The Month That Ends in Halloween Starts With These Beery News Notes

Now that I am six months (yikes!) into retirement, I am moving into a bit of a more organized approach to doing nothing. My plan is to really really achieve a state of active non-achievement and, so, on Tuesday I spent the morning an hour and a half to my east to meet up with an old pal who drove an hour and a half to his southwest. He retired on the same day I did by pure co-inky-dink. We had coffee in Prescott, Ontario and looked across the big river at downtown Ogdensburg, NY as we talked about not being employed and the related turning off many mental light switches. These two ships above did the decent thing and passed each other right in front of us just before we jumped back in our cars to make the way home for lunch. We also noticed the leftovers of crayfish strewn along the waterside path. Happy are the gulls. And at 11 am, the bells of the Ogdensburg City Hall clocktower rang clear across the water, taunting me with thoughts of the now forbidden delights of upstate NY such as white hots and top level NCAA hockey at the beautiful Appleton Arena a bit further inland. Once the current tariff war is settled, I will be back.

On a similar theme, first up in the beer news… more tariff time. This week, the US took the next retaliatory steps against Canadian booze:

President Donald Trump’s ban on Canadian booze kicked in on Tuesday, an unprecedented move that underscores the breakdown in one of the closest trading relationships in the world… President Donald Trump’s ban on Canadian booze kicked in on Tuesday, an unprecedented move that underscores the breakdown in one of the closest trading relationships in the world… For beer, though, the ban is virtually impossible to get around without an American bottling arm because it covers the bottles, cans and kegs that consumers typically buy. A Canadian business could technically ship beer to the US in a tanker, but that’s hardly practical.

Apparently 50% of Canadian spirits are exported and 93% of that goes to the US. But many brands like Crown Royal heading to the US market are already bottled in the States. And I think years ago I read that Unibroue in Quebec was supplying bulk beer (or maybe wort) for finishing and packaging in the USA so it might be something that can be worked out. Also, brewing brands under license occurs. But only to a point. So we shall see how this plays out.

And my very own* North Country Public Radio has made the update this week with the story of how tarrifs in the other direction have imposed on one cidery that focuses on the local as much as possible:

The problem is that most people drink Nine Pin’s ciders in cans — around 2.4 million cans each year. And while those cans are manufactured by Ball Co. in Saratoga, about 25 miles away, they’re made from imported aluminum sheets. Nine Pin co-founder Sonya del Peral said that a local business relying on a nearby harvest should be insulated from the trade war. But it isn’t. “It feels like that’s some global thing, and it is, but the aluminum sheets that Ball uses to make the cans come from Canada,” Nine Pin cofounder Sonya del Peral said. “Otherwise, we’re such a hyperlocal business.”

Elsewhere, over on Facebook Laura has shared some information about Sam Smith’s dealings with their pub assets:

Two weeks after publishing the story about the sale of the Wellington Inn at Knaresborough with a “non-pub use only” covenant on it, which we discussed here at length, the York Press has realised that the covenant is actually the real news here and got comment from CAMRA. I’m wondering whether Tom Gordon MP is being kept apprised of the situation and what his thoughts are on Sam Smiths taking a number of local pubs out of circulation without any proper recourse to the change of use procedures built into the planning system. It’s clear that a number of the SS pubs currently up for sale (21 it seems), though not all, have this restriction on them. It would prevent the local community for applying for Asset of Community Value status, for example… The Oldham Times is reporting on the same situation in their patch, relating to the Commercial Inn on Smallbrook Road in Shaw… Another “non-pub use only” sale.

A more vibrant scene was described in The Guardian which published a story by Scott Antcliffe on the search for the true kölsch in Cologne and provided a portrait of a number of fine establishments, including this on Brauhaus Sünner im Walfisch:

Down a cobbled alley in the old town, Sünner im Walfisch is pure historical theatre. Housed in a striking 17th-century step-gabled building, dismantled and rebuilt brick by brick on its current site, it serves as the old town outpost for Sünner, Cologne’s oldest operating kölsch brewery. Inside, narrow timber-framed rooms and low ceilings transport you back to medieval Rhineland. The beer is fantastic – crisp and dry with a peppery hop finish that makes it dangerously easy to drink – and it’s quieter and more intimate than the echoing halls near the station, its köbesse still delivering drinks with a wink of humour. A favourite for decor and character, if not quite for atmosphere.

Decor also was the question I hereby poach from Boak and Bailey’s Saturday update last week where the comments had some very interesting views of the origin of the long bar and queuing in UK pubs, including this:

When the Great Western Railway opened to Bristol in 1841, all express trains made a stop at Swindon so that passengers could stock up in the refreshment rooms (there were no on-board catering facilities in those days). Those refreshment rooms were fitted with exceptionally long counters so that the rush of passengers could be dealt with quickly and efficiently. Indeed, there was much comment in the press about the length of the counters.

Contrary-wise, as reported at ProBrewer.com, White Labs have announced a significant downsize:

White Labs, the well-known yeast supplier to the homebrewing and craft brewing industry has sold its San Diego facility and will be moving operations into a smaller location at the nearby Home Brew Mart. No changes will be made to its product availability or services, but the company will auction off its brewery, cellar and taproom equipment from its old location… The company will now run most of its yeast production and storage out of its Asheville, North Carolina location which it opened in 2017. The West Coast operations will be moved to a smaller facility and contain mostly administrative personnel and laboratory operations.

“This is infrastructure loss,” said Drew. Jason shared a link to the auction. Speaking of loss, in his latest edition of Hop Queries Stan has listed the effects of climate change on the European hop crop this year:

The Association of German Hop Growers estimates they will harvest 33,779 metric tons (about 75 million pounds), compared to 43,141 in 2025.  The Czech Hop Growers Union estimates production will be down about 25% from 5,207 metric tons in 2025. The official results from alpha screening by the Czech Chmelarsky Institut show historically low alpha values of 1.8% for Saaz. In Slovenia, in addition to the heat repeated hailstorms damaged about half 4,000 acres strung for harvest, with losses in yield between 10% and 100%. In Poland, frost damaged hops in some fields at the beginning of the season and the area suffered through the same high heat and low moisture conditions as the rest of Europe.

Happier thoughts next as I quite enjoyed last Friday’s cartoon in Pellicle by Dave Bailey (no relation) who took on the plight of the rejected Landlord logo lads and told the tale of how logo lads get on with their lot in life. And, showing me the way,  Retired Martin shared the moment he faces every year when the Good Beer Guide comes out and he gets his marching orders to investigate the new entries:

The new Good Beer Guide has dropped (ugh); it would have been poetic to blame my injury on the descent of this massive brick of a book (forgot to mention that last post), but it arrived while I was in Dewsbury and flattened Mrs RM instead. Having made every effort to limit the walk to and from the football (even took the metro to Piccadilly) the only sensible option was to get home and rest. But “sensible” isn’t a criticism often directed at me, and when the internet returned somewhere near Dore I started planning a “cheeky” (ugh) pint at a closest GBG new entry…

Viva cheeky pints!! Viva!!! Here are some notes:

Note #1: A massive personal wine collection.
Note #2: The first “news photo” from 1853.
Note #3: “Health beer”!?!?

About a month ago, I posted a short post on a tavern in my fair town and, on their next Patreon footnotes page, Boak and Bailey commented this way:

It’s always cook when a theme emerges in the post we’ve gathered together in the round up. This week, it’s obviously about what makes pubs feel relaxed, informal comunity spaces. Alan McLeod’s “tavs” are alien to us, although he does a great job evoking their atmosphere and vibe: “When I paid my bill on the way out, I got called “hon’” by someone less than half my age. “We good” she said with a thumbs up. The beer was a buck cheaper too. We good.”

Happy then was I as I came across an incredibly good set of short videos on Facebook called “Every Dive Bar in New Brunswick” where the documentarian (whose name I can’t spot) goes into tavs and describes what she sees. This one for me is a “tavern” or a “tav” more often as not. This one as well. Notice the really informal but bright busy vibe. Folks are “buddies” too.  Plus very little attention to the finishings of the place that needs to be respected for the punishment they can take. And this bar recorded (on another Facebook page) in Iowa also appears to be a “tav” to me. But this one is not a “tav” so much as a true “dive” to my mind. Looks a notch harder with darker interior and maybe more male oriented. Yet, there is much overlap… and the man who calls Keglers Bar in Moncton “our drinking home” nails it.

Observing another more rarified snack bracket, Eoghan shared the hallmarks of summer’s end he has spotted in Brussels inlcuding this ceremony:

I know summer is over when I see men in grey smocks amassing at the entrance to Brussels’ town hall on the Grand Place, on the first Friday in September. Usually I arrive too late to see the portly men in their traditional brewer’s outfits, some carrying wooden brewer’s mash paddles and others shouldering in quartets mock wooden barrels, arriving at the end of their ceremonial parade down the hill from Brussels’ cathedral cathedral. The parade, and the official church service that precedes it and features a priest dousing the beer barrel in holy water as an official blessing, is the starting shot for the Belgian Beer Weekend, a festival which occupies the whole of the Grand Place across the first weekend in September, and which is very committed to its pageantry.

Some holy moly archeological news care of Merryn from a few weeks ago in The Smithsonian.  A 13,000 year old burial site on Mount Carmel shows evidence of brewing by a pre-ag hunter-gatherer culture:

The evidence of brewing comes from “boulder mortars”: a stick can gouge out a hole in limestone, widening or exploiting existing water-formed low places. Inside these holes were found ‘phytoliths’: microscopic fragments of silica from inside plant cells & starch granules with evidence of malting. Together, these tell the story of a process: Someone gathered seeds by hand, stored them in fiber bags, placed them in a bedrock mortar & smashed them up, then transferred them to a hole where they soaked, germinated & malted. The mash was heated & left to ferment with windborne yeast.

So… lambic in terms of airborne yeast but using malted field grass seeds?  Very cool.

And finally, Boak and Bailey have given further consideration to the crap that A.I. is foisting upon us via PR crap sent out the beer scribbling set and how it conflicts with their thoughts about how good digital communications products and services are designed and delivered:

One key principle is that you start by putting a lot of effort into researching and identifying something people need, or at least want; and then you build it. But most of these AI-generated websites and apps seem to start from the other end: think of something you can easily make with AI to boost your limited coding and writing skills; then see if anyone is interested. AI makes this feasible because there’s so little effort involved in making something that you might as well take the ‘throw enough mud and some of it will stick’ approach. Except – except! – you’re then creating a bloody big tidal wave of mud for everyone else to wade through on your behalf.

They wisely advise “ignoring emails which have obviously been written with AI.” On a similar theme, apparently the US is going to remain A.I. as “Super Intelligence” which seems to be a throwback to the Information Super Highway era. Quite appropriate as cousin Wee Donnie wants to have us all living in the past. And seeing as everyone, like me, called “AL” are being  blamed for everything that AI does or doesn’t do, I completely support the idea of a new term. But I have a modest proposal for a better alternative. “Shitelligence” which, if you can’t immediately see the beauty of the idea is a combination of Intelligence with an honest acknowlegement that it is… shit. The same “S.I.” acronym can be used. Plus it is mellifluous. Trips off the tongue: “…shi-telly-gents…” You are welcome.

That is it for now. Until next week, please look tothis week’s doublist due Boak and Bailey’s postings on each and every Saturday along with the coincidenal and fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. They do put in the effort. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then it’s your turn. Read and recommend, please. Scour the world for news tips – then let me know. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. What else?

*Scroll down!

Your Summer’s Lease Sure As Hell Hath All Too Short A Date Beery News Notes For A Thursday

“Bud By The Bay“

Welcome to autumn. The burning of fossil fuels within my home has already begun. And the wearing of more layers. It’s madness all this circling of the sun. A few days ago, it was too hot. Now… I wonder if it will be too hot ever again. I think deep thoughts like that from time to time because, as the poet wrote, I am a sensitive man. So sensitive that I took a photo of the scene above when I came upon a can of Bud sitting quite upright by a familar path, looking out upon the waters. I am also, apparently, a student these days. Forty five years after starting the FYP program at Kings College (aka Bings Bollege), I signed up for the new mini version. So I must be extra clever this week having studied Ajax for minutes on end. Right? Well, we and the gods shall now have to see if anything actually sinks in.

What’s up in beer news? First up: when did the copper age end and the bronze age begin… in Bulgaria? What ever the label, apparently there was wheat ale brewing 6,500 years ago in that corner of Europe:

 Bulgarian archaeologists found evidence that beer was produced at “Provadia-Solnitsata” (5600–4350 BC)-Europe’s oldest salt-production and urban center. This was announced by the leader of the archaeological works, Academician Vasil Nikolov, who presented the team’s summer findings to journalists, BTA reported. According to Nikolov, this likely represents the earliest production of the beverage in the region and possibly in all of Europe. He noted that botanist Elena Marinova contributed to the discovery. A broken vessel was found containing wheat that had sprouted in the manner required to produce malt. The vessel was discovered in a house that had burned down.

I know that Merryn will be pleased with that sort of residual organics analysis. I like that the house burned down. Breweries were always burning down around here 240 years ago. Good sign.

Perhaps another good sign is how, as Jessica Mason reports, it seems that the Canadian and US administations’ mutual tariffs on aluminum products are having an important effect… though likely not the one the White House intended:

Southern Ontario’s Caravan Bev Co’s owner Shane Vear had also admitted that he also imports and distributes Chinese cans and since then his business has risen 30% since last year. Vancouver Island’s Strait & Narrow president Yuri Akeroyd told the publication that his company moved most of its can purchases to China over the past eight months and insisted that the decision was about “survival”. Akeroyd also stated that “cost” was not the only reason for the shift and added that following nearly two years of policy swings that buying from overseas felt “less volatile”.

Import… get it?  Fine. Well, there is someone out there seeking to promote stability. You know the guy working on the creation of cybermen or some other sort of robot army.

Speaking of laying waste, VinePair published a great article by Aaron Goldfarb on the regret and shame and bad feelings and waste of one’s life you can feel when you have a cellar full of beer that was promised to age:

I was saving these beers for some special occasion. But plenty of special occasions came and went and I never drank them. And there they sit: too worthless now to sell, too heavy to haul upstairs on a whim, too fraught to simply throw away because tossing them would mean admitting my wife was right a decade ago, when she kept asking why I needed to buy more beer when I already had so much. I only had one choice, and Leslie’s advice kept ringing in my head: “They’ve all passed their prime, and at this point you might as well just crack them.”

I think it was about ten years ago the I gave away most of the “important” beers I started aging about twent years ago. I probably have more down there in the cellar like my two panic bottles of Girardin Gueuze. I don’t even want to think what they are like given I bought them in the first term of the Obama administration.  Another more serious sort of crime against booze was discussed by Jason Wilson this week with a seriously hefty fine on the line:

On September 10th, the federal government announced that Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits—which controls about one third of all U.S. wine and spirits distribution—agreed to pay $12.5 million in fines over bribery and false invoicing practices. Southern Glazer’s entered into a “non-prosecution agreement” with federal prosecutors for “executives and employees funding and concealing improper payments and benefits to employees of alcohol retailers, including chain grocery stores in California and elsewhere.”

Wilson shares the opinon that the fine is a “rounding error” for the firm that takes in $26 billion USD a year and especially insufficient for an eight year long pattern of infraction. He calls for drinkers to rise up! As you think on that call to action, here’s some notes! Here’s some notes as you plan the revolution.

Note #1: Matty C on some hop parlance.
Note #2: “…3.5% more than in the same period last year…”
Note #3: part beer shop, part radio station.
Note #4: Lars has a new book – The Power of Beer!

What else is going on? Well, David Nilsen in CB&B has provided us with a helpful primer on the French hop industry:

When we think of French hops, we typically think of Strisselspalt, a delicate Noble-adjacent hop with fine herbal-floral aromas and restrained bittering. That classic variety took up most of the Alsace’s 400 hectares under trellis until nearly 20 years ago, and most of that crop was contracted to Anheuser Busch. When InBev purchased the company in 2008, it also abruptly terminated the Strisselspalt contract. That not only meant an immediate loss of sales, but it also left the French hop industry with a visibility problem. Few brewers were familiar with French hops because Anheuser Busch had been using most of them. Yet the rhizomes for a possible future had already been planted. Hop France had begun a hop-breeding program in 2001 with the primary purpose of improving—or replacing—the bittering performance of Strisselspalt…

Frikkin Strisselspalt…. just… don’t ask. And from New Zealand, Kieran Haslett-Moore has shared the idyllic story of a beer fest by a southern sea:

The sun is setting over the alps and is catching the clouds, setting them alight with glorious flaming reds set against the over ripe blue of the heavens. The spectacle is a Salvador Dali painting animated to reality. Beneath the spectacle of the natural world sits one from the realm of human endeavour. Cobbled streets of ornate Victorian white stone have weathered 150 years of southern ocean storms and Kiwi lust for the wrecking ball. Within two of the old buildings Bruxelles Oamaru is in full swing. It is like there is a portal from the sleepy southern town straight into the back streets of Brussels. Goblets of oaky spontaneous ale, various tart, fruited concoctions, lemon-flavoured blonde ales, saison and even a Belgian stout are drunk, discussed and enjoyed. 

What a scene. It’s like good beer was starting fresh all over again. Similar too was the report from Imran Rahman-Jones who has been slumming by the Mediterranean:

I am writing this from the heel of Italy’s boot, otherwise known as Puglia, where it’s still shorts weather and the Nivea factor 50 continues to be sprayed every few hours. The Italian beer here has generally ranged from “not to my taste” to “objectively poor”, with a couple falling into the “very nice served ice-cold but make sure you get it finished before it starts tasting of anything” category. The supermarkets here seem to have as many German and Belgian beers on the shelves as Italian ones. It seems Italy has, like France, decided it should stick to doing what it does better than anyone else (wine), and happily imports the good beer from its European friends.

Blunt but now doubt accurate. And, to be fair, there is a place for the utility of a well placed “very nice served ice-cold but make sure you get it finished before it starts tasting of anything” beer. Similarly, there were some refreshingly simple business truths this week from Chadd Balbi at Breweries in Pennsylvania:

If you’re walking into an industry with a high failure rate, you should probably be ready to face that day when it comes. The data is telling you that you will most likely close… it shouldn’t then come as a surprise. The craft beer boom of 2017/2018 in PA had a lot of different impacts. While most of them were positive (more locally made beer on the market, more jobs added to communities), we are seeing a fair share of negatives as well. One of the biggest downsides of the rise in craft beer are people who probably should have never entered the world of small business ownership. From cutting costs, employee mistreatment (*cough* Bald Birds/ Tired Hands *cough*) and just closing with no notice the industry is still riddled with poorly run businesses.

Naming names and pointing fingures?!?! How refreshing. And professor and historian Dr. Dan Malleck has posted some thoughts on the relatively low risk of  harm caused by moderate alcohol intake over at LinkedIn:

For many people, drinking does have value. I don’t need to re-litigate this, but from socialization, to creativity, to relaxation, alcohol brings value to many people’s lives. Even if you just really like the taste, there is a value. (Is there a risk? Yes, just like a risk in driving excessive speeds, eating way too much beef, chronic sun exposure, or … getting really into cutting wood (I guess) there is a harm of excess.) The difference here is when we talk about alcohol we always need to frame it harm-forward. We can’t just say it’s ok to drink without saying something like “but know your limit” or “if you are worried about your drinking, seek help.” That’s an interesting social convention that we don’t have to use when offering people a ride, cooking them a steak, inviting them to go for a walk, or asking them to help you cut some wood.

It’s a lucid argument but it does invite my mind to wander towards the consideration of the other non-intoxicating pursuits in life that also may enhance socialization, creativity and to relaxation. Are there such medical studies on the risks associated with birdwatching? Doubt it. On napping? Not so much. And if we are being honest, I would worry if socialization, creativity and relaxation were mainly enjoyed by someone after a drink or two. We need to, yes, think of relative risk but really be thinking of relative risk/benefit.

Finally and for the double, David Nilsen has the feature in Pellicle this week, a portrait of Off Color Brewing in Chicago:

Off Color opened in 2013 with two beers: Troublesome—a classic, unfruited gose—and Scurry, a kottbusser. Launching with two obscure German styles was less a statement of defiance than an indication of intent: They were going to brew delicious, approachable beer, but it wasn’t going to be everyone else’s delicious, approachable beer. As unorthodox as Off Color’s beer was, it was matched by the quirky, black-and-white label art. Craft beer branding at the time was rarely subtle, and John and Dave opted for contrast from the prismatic norm rather than competing with a cornucopia of colorful labels. “We ended up on black-and-white just because it really stands out on liquor store shelves,” John says.

Well, that is it for now. It’s been a bit of a quiet week or at least one that had distraction. For me the main one being the arrival of a team of masons who responded to the call and spent a couple of days parging, capping and rebuilding the front step which (in accordance with the Ontario’s Building Code circa 1964) houses the cold room that houses my stash. As with the furnace and the roof, I know enough about concrete to avoid my own advice and certainly my skills. And it always amazes me when capable folk arrive at the house, totally fix problems that visit one’s mind in the hours before dawn night after night –  and only want money. Isn’t money great? Now I can get back to just worrying if I have enough for the next crisis.

As you think on that, please look to Boak and Bailey’s postings on each and every Saturday along with the coincidenal and fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. They do put in the effort. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then it’s your turn. Read and recommend, please. Scour the world for news tips – then let me know. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. What else?

*No footnotes this week. Not one.

These Are The Melancholy But At Least Not Mundane Last Beery News Notes Of The Summer

The end of summer. The last stragglers back from holidays. Yellowjackets everywhere. Tired sweetpeas starting to show their age. Tomatoes ripening faster on the vine, some going soft before I get to them in the sauce pot, then into ziplock bags destined for a spot deep into the freezer. I’m even starting to think about getting the garlic ready to plant before the first frost. It all starts to move pretty fast right around now.

Speaking of fast, as Canada is suddenly accused of nuzzling up to the EU, asking if we can spend the weekend – or is it the other way around –  it’s funny to see a politician in France castigated for doing the one thing even a t-total conservative candidate here must always do if they hope to have a hope:

A French presidential hopeful has been accused by leftwingers of encouraging alcoholism after he released a campaign video showing him with a beer. In the video, Gabriel Attal, 37, who was President Macron’s prime minister in 2024, announced plans to hold debates with voters in bistrots across the country. He said he wanted to revive tradition: Enlightenment philosophy had emerged in France’s small dining establishments in the 18th century, he said, as had the call to storm the Bastille in 1789…. The launch of Attal’s “1,000 Bistrots” initiative, as he is calling it, seems unlikely to boost his standing among voters, according to commentators. They noted that it had been widely mocked on social media, with one user saying that the candidate looked more like a spritz than a beer drinker.

Not to worry. He’s way behind in the polls. Speaking of not doing so well, let’s get these interesting numbers from BMI out of the way early this week:

Close to $120 mil in craft $$ tracked by NielsenIQ thru Aug 8 came from 138 craft brands with at least $150K in sales this yr and no sales this time last yr. But it’s top heavy, natch. The top 25 new craft brands generated about 2/3 of that total, each racking up around $1 mil in retail sales. With total craft $$, including craft non-alc, down 4.2% yr to date, existing brands are off over 6% as a group. 

Yikes. So has US craft beer – which told us it came into being to defeat the monoglot of macro – become what it abhored? Fewer and fewer brands, limited in difference hogging more and more of the shelf space? Apparently, not only have fruit flavoured beers chased the tail of coolers but apparently New Belgium’s 11% ABV Voodoo Ranger is the top new beer. Taking on the “electric soup” RTD competition. As Knut notes:

Most Norwegians buy their beer at a supermarket, but the range available has dwindled over the years, with fake cider, hard seltzer and ready mixed drinks taking over much of the shelves.

Tomorrow belong to the gak. Not everyone has noticed. Ontario’s Peterborough Examiner published an opinion piece by apparently self-published author Bruce Gravel that reads like it was defrosted from a glacier that formed around the good beer conversation around 2006 to 2012:

He finally took a sip. He didn’t swallow. Instead, he held the beer in his mouth, churning it around his gums like mouthwash. He made a loud, wet aerating sound — slurrrrp — that caused people at the next table to look over in disgust. He swallowed, closed his eyes, and performed a full 60 seconds of silent contemplation to measure the “finish.” The ultimate annoyance of the beer snob is their complete inability to let anyone else enjoy their drink. When our friend Sarah arrived and ordered a cider, Sebastian spent 10 minutes explaining why her choice was a sugary insult to fermented beverages.

You know, that New Yorker cover is now twelve years old. I thought news editors by definition were up to date on the booze scene, you know, from personal experience.  Speaking of which, here’s some notes with the first one on the better approach in such matters.

Note #1: Advice to journalists.
Note #2: Don’t most people at cricket matches drink beer?
Note #3: Belgium… “if it isn’t poison, it goes into the beer.”
Note #4: All you need to know… twenty something words…

Speaking of simplification, here’s a central European leaning timeline of brewing history. It’s a pretty good effort but, again, pale malt was not first made upon the adoption of coke. Straw fired pale malt drying was common well before coke. Conversely, Katie Mather won a writing prize. And she wrote about winning a prize. And thanked her editor:

Last year, Claire Bullen edited a story I wrote for Pellicle about wine in Tenerife and the Orotava region. It started as an off-the-cuff idea borne from sheer enthusiasm—I had just visited the island and fallen in love with Mount Teide. I have a thing for tall, brooding guys. Most of my best stories come from a small, sharp inkling that I’ve seen or tasted something life changing, and that little feeling gets worked into every thought. Working out the story is part of the fun. Why do I want to tell this tale? How would I even begin? Editors get the hardest job and the least credit. I worked away on my story, did the research, painstakingly rewrote the drafts, but were it not for the editorial process, it wouldn’t be half as good as I think it is now. And I happen to think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, still, over a year later.

You know what’s not the best thing? The price of beer at Oktoberfest according to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle:

A Mass, the traditional 1-liter (2.1-pint) serving at Oktoberfest, will cost an average of €15.61 ($18.50) this year. In 1985, it cost about 6.25 Deutschmarks, equivalent to €3.20 after conversion at the fixed euro exchange rate. The figures were analyzed by UniCredit economist Andreas Rees ahead of the opening of the world’s largest beer festival on Saturday. Beer prices at Oktoberfest have increased by around 400% since 1985, according to Rees, using data from Munich’s statistical office. Consumer prices across Germany, by comparison, have risen by around 120% over the same period.

Next, we were off to New Zealand this week with Pellicle‘s feature by Martin Bridges on the Garage Project:

…the plain white box—adorned with nothing but the word “BEER” in a bold, black font—stands out. This classic pale lager, which has been a mainstay of Garage Project’s core range since 2014, is an ode to the power of subtlety and simplicity. Pilsner malt, Saaz hops, Czech yeast. No more, no less. Does exactly what it says on the tin… “It was a bit of a ‘screw you!’ to the big breweries to show that yes, we can do a lot of progressive beers with a lot of adjuncts and flavours and spice and unusual techniques—like hot rocks and making our own cryo hops from liquid nitrogen—but we can also do a fantastic, straight, Czech-inspired lager,” he says.

And, once we’ve had all that, there are the consequnces to be endured. Joan Fitzpatrick at The Conversation wrote aabout the ancient, medieval and early modern ethics and cures for over drinking:

Classical authorities were regularly cited as recommending the consumption of certain foods before a drinking session, with almonds, cabbage, baked quinces, wormwood (absinthe) and even the lungs of a goat being thought beneficial.  They had tips on how to feel better after a surfeit of food and drink. Dietary authors recommended the benefits of moderate exercise, specifically walking, and sleep, with purging by vomit as a last resort. The medieval dietary authors had praised cloves as restorative and good for stomach trouble. But perhaps any notion of a “cure” for a hangover is based upon the questionable premise that one can undo the self-induced damage to body and mind caused by a bout of heavy drinking.

Perhaps some Korean hangover soup would suit you better. David Jesudason shared another sort of tough story in The Greenwich Wire this week, one about Stacey Ayeh of the Bouldr Bar taproom in southeast London and the struggle to get the doors open… and keep them open:

Bouldr Bar’s launch faced delays with wrangling over planning issues, such as increasing the number of toilets. The biggest headache was finding a way for a bar, planned brewery and food offering to meet Bexley Council’s requirements, because it is housed at ground level under new-build flats… The unit next door to Bouldr Bar remains empty. Stacey believes this was going to be occupied by Starbucks. Stacey believes that to create more food options, Peabody needs to build a tower vent system to keep the council happy. Bouldr Bar is in a state of flux until it can be installed – a new wall has been built but not painted. 

At the other end of the economic scale, Heineken is making a claim to an “A.I.” powered beer tap… which might be the fibberfibberony of the year so far:

According to a statement from the brewer, the technology uses “a combination of tastes, moods, and occasions to create more than 100 tailored beers”. Most intriguingly, the new technology means that, from a single tap, drinkers can now choose from 135 different Heineken expressions, each shaped by a combination of traditional brewing characteristics, such as strength, intensity, with options ranging from 0.0% to 5% ABV.  Consumers simply need to scan a QR code, customise your taste preferences on their phones, and then the kit blends their perfect brew using its “integrated barrels”.

Who buys into this sorta guff? Drunk computer sci frosh? The falsification of beer continues with the rise of “protein beer” as reviewed by Adam Campbell-Schmitt at The Food Network:

The protein drink is actually a nonalcoholic beer boasting 10 grams of plant protein (sourced from pea and rice) per 16-ounce can. That’s about five to ten times as much protein as a regular, alcoholic brew. (If you’re counting carbs and calories, each can of ChampionSips contains 90 calories and 11 grams of carbohydrates.) However, like many NA beers, it should be noted that ChampionSips “contains less than 0.5% ABV.”… As someone who has tried a lot of protein products, I could detect a bit of the pea protein. But largely what I tasted was a very malty pilsner, heavy on the caramel and toasted notes. While it may not pass as your favorite beer, it does its job of swapping some pretty palatable protein into a pleasant beer drinking experience.

Grim. What would the Senators of New York State circa 1835 who gathered in committee to respond to public alarm about the adulteration of beer think about such things. Me, I find that a rib steak or a smash burger injects some pretty palatable protein into my beer drinking experience.

Finally and speaking of falsification, Boak and Bailey took a comment on A.I. writing that I made last week and then, at their Patreon newsletter, made more of it:

… we think we can see the tell-tale signs. For example, a sudden change in writing style, with entire paragraphs adopting a strangely flowery, elaborate tone of voice while, at the same time, being devoid of any real substance. While both of us broadly subscribe to the idea that “if you can’t be bothered to write it, I can’t be bothered to read it” we’re not going to take a totally hard line. It’s also difficult for us to know for sure whether someone has used AI to write some or all of a blog post, even if we suspect it. We don’t want to write people off because we get a vibe. (This unfortunate ambiguity is, of course, how AI ends up worming its way into our lives.) It’s especially tricky with writers who are new to us and whom we haven’t been following for years. We don’t know how they usually write and so can’t spot when their style changes.

I commented* but… but… what I didn’t mention is related to what they wrote: “if you can’t be bothered to write…” I know someone who has found a niche that may make him a bit of side cash that relies almost entirely on innoquous A.I. use. It’s a form of design creativity that results in absolutely throw away content. So who cares? It’s just about the extra cash for him. But look at what Laura wrote over on FB. Because it’s good to care. So if you really do care, if you want to put your name on something? Well, you are drinking out of the dog’s water dish if what you put out relies on crap A.I. tech. “Relies” carries a lot of work in that sentence for sure… but if that’s what you’ve done your name bears the shame.

That’s it for now. I gotta get back out to the garden. While I do, please look to Boak and Bailey’s postings on each and every Saturday along with the coincidenal and fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. They do put in the effort. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then it’s your turn. Read and recommend, please. Scour the world for news tips – then let me know. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. What else?

*Fine, this was my comment: “I am afraid that A.I. is a bit like men’s cologne. You think you will just use a little, no one will really notice but it makes someone feel better about oneself. To the contrary, it’s like wearing some bit of orange clothing. It does stand out, it never really works and it usually ruins whatever effect you were going for. It’s also lazy because it’s unnecessary. If you are going to pretend you are a writer then do the frigging writing. Put in the time. Like any effort, you improve by error and succeed through the individual quirk of personal expression. A.I. editing is like claiming you cooked the meal when you got take away.” 

Your Cooler Yet Still Cozy Beery News Notes For The First Hints Of The Coming Autumn

view of man laying asleep on a sofa

The author in his natural state…

Here we are again. Me, I am semi-bachelor boy this week as the last two kids moved into their own places across town over the summer and the Euro-eldest is hosting herself and an aunt. So… here I am and, obviously, I have, you know… chores. Winter, after all, is coming. Which more obviously means I am pulling out and inspecting the state of my sweater vests and cardigans, rearranging the coffee mug shelf, writing about 1820s taverns, preparing a powerpoint for a late October presentation on beer related newspaper notices 1790s to 1840 from my fair City – and doing anything or nothing else I can think of to avoid being useful like putting my hand on a caulking gun or emptying out the eavestroughs. All as I scratch at the mosquito bites from just crawling through the tomato patch out in the yard earlier this week. Best to stay inside. Winter is, after all, coming.

Before moving on the news, a note from the editorial staff. I was reading in The New Yorker by Jill Lepore oddly titled “Bot or Not” in the physical magazine but “Are You A Human?” online. Two things stuck out bluntly in the article. First, the function of reCAPTCHA gatekeeping online isn’t about you clicking the botton to tell them you are a human but to watch you as you click to determine how your cursor movement proves you are. Plus the moment taken to do so allows the bot to scour your activity to back up your claim to humanity.* The other thing noted is this:

…at this point there are more bots online than people. To deal with this problem, businesses retain bot-detection and bot-management firms, a specialty within the field of cybersecurity. Their task used to be to block bots, but, with the rise of agentic A.I., that has changed. Now the problem is how to let in the good bots (like the avatar you send to the Gap to buy you a new pair of pants) and keep out the bad bots (like the thief trying to scrape the data of every Gap customer). **

All of which is to say that it is becoming a bit harder to find actual real stories online to read and share with you. Thankfully, a number of you message me one way or another with tips. In the comments, via BlueSky, by email and via DMs, too. Tips are fabulous. Always appreciated. Unless you are a bot. Unless you are that Vietnamese A.I. slop farm that’s just layering digital shit upon shit. You suck.

plaque on pink stone wall indicating exact international boundary between Canada and the USA located at Thousand Islands BridgeNow with the beery news. Let’s start with the bigger picture, the Canadian-US tariff battles continue and have already had a serious effect on Ontario’s brewing industry:

Japanese brewer Sapporo says it will move some beer production from Canada to the US after new tariffs on Canadian beer took effect on Tuesday. The move follows the introduction of a 50% tariff on beer imported from Canada. For companies shipping beer across the border, that means significantly higher costs. Chief strategy officer Rieko Shofu described tariffs as “something out of our control,” telling Bloomberg that the beer giant would “move ahead with local production.” Sapporo did not immediately respond to the BBC’s request for comment. The company plans to shift production of its non-alcoholic beer, currently made in Canada for US customers, to the US by the first half of 2027.

Sapporo’s Unibroue operations in Quebec remain unaffected for now. Late in the evening on Tuesday, the Wizened Orange Fuzz announced that not only are there going to be tariffs but complete import bans:

The White House posted five new executive orders Tuesday evening that exclude certain Canadian products from being imported into the U.S., alcohol among them. The administration is also adding more Canadian goods to the list of those that are subject to 50 per cent tariffs. A sweeping ban on Canadian booze is set to take effect on Sept. 29. “The following products of Canada are excluded from importation into the United States,” says Trump’s ban on Canadian alcohol, going on to list beer, wine, cider, whiskies, vodka and other spirits.

Interestingly, however, they also announced the lifting of tariffs on other Canadian goods of equal value. Things we sell that Americans actually need like toilet paper and concrete. I live by the border as you know and that last item is a relief locally as limestone is made into cement around here from quarried stone that is burned in a massive kiln. The resulting powder is then sailed by cargo ship the few miles south to Oswego NY across the lake where the cement is used to make city sidewalks and skyscrapers. Another thing we will think about tomorrow as we remember the twenty-fifth.

Elsewhere and more happily, Knut has written about three breweries who were showing their wares when he visited the Trondheim Brewery Festival including the northernmost brewery in the world:

Svalbard Bryggeri, the northernmost in the world, was present for the first time. The founder of the brewery, Robert, has had an uphill battle to get it all started. The first obstacle was the legislation – the production of alcohol was banned in Svalbard. The bureaucracy was bewildered and not particularly eager to do something about it, but years of lobbying finally gave fruit. The first brew was made in 2015. There are more challenges in running a brewery under arctic conditions – water supply is one of them. But the water treatment for the brewery has a side effect – they also supply clean drinking water to the local community. They have their own brewery tap in Longyearbyen, Vinmonopolet and pubs and bars on the Norwegian mainland also offer their beers. Norwegian airlines have Svalbard beer on some of their routes…

Coming up on twenty years ago (!) when this was a multi-author beer blog, Knut wrote about traveling to find Kroa, what was then the most northerly bar in the world, back when Svalbard was known as Spitzbergen. Svalbard Bryggeri appears to be about a kilometre north of Kroa.

To the south, Boak and Bailey have begun their reports on their vacation to the Czech Republic including thoughts from… err… sorry… impressions of Prague as well as from Brno. Other than them needing to take tips from Ron on insightful breakfast buffet reportage, these are fabuous descriptions with this caveat from their BlueSky account:

We landed on this ‘impressions of’ format a few years ago because we dread anyone thinking that we’re daring to offer a ‘definitive guide’ to somewhere we’ve only visited on holiday. Our very first blog post back in 2007 was carefully titled ‘Nice places to drink in…’ for the same reason.

Bravissimo! And always a great reminder that it is wise to first listen to the person’s views from there… wherever “there” is. Then… go wander around there (or anywhere) yourself and report back on that, too.

Reporting back himself is Will Hawkes. His monthly London Beer City newsletter features the history of The Pembroke of Earl’s Court – previously The Coleherne – probably London’s most famous gay pub:

It appeared in Armistead Maupin’s Babycakes (“He walked several blocks past high-windowed brick buildings to a gay pub called the Coleherne … He ordered a gin and tonic and stood at the bulletin board reading announcements about Gay Tory meetings and ‘jumble sales’ to benefit deaf lesbians.”) and the Stranglers’ 1977 tune Hanging Around (‘I’m moving in the Coleherne/ With the leather all around me /And the sweat is getting steamy /But their eyes are on the ground /They’re just hanging around’). Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett were regulars…  The Coleherne was well-established by the 1970s; it had first attracted gay customers in the 1950s, at a time when it was becoming a centre for jazz, too. Trinidadian pianist Russell Henderson first played here in 1962, launching its golden era. Sunday lunchtimes in the 60s and 70s brought together a diverse range of musicians, from British R&B pioneer Graham Bond to “Philly Joe” Jones, who played with Miles Davies. The likes of Mick Jagger and Georgie Fame came to enjoy the music.

Somewhat related but perhaps for another snack bracket is The Telegraph‘s weekly question on cultural matters asked what is the perfect quantity of beer? The responses were largely identical:

Jim Henny wrote: “As a nearly 50-year-old male, I can’t think of any scenario where I might order a half. Might as well not bother.” I also enjoyed this, from Ron Giddnes: “My wife’s plain-speaking Geordie uncle, when asked whether he wanted a pint or a half, replied that he had tried a half once but didn’t like it.” Malcolm Monaghan, meanwhile, identified a genuine hazard of smaller measures: “A friend went through a short phase of switching to halves, in an attempt to reduce his alcohol consumption. It was a disaster. He’d scoop the wee measures, and ended up drinking about 50 per cent more than the rest of us who were on the pints.”

Halfs are for boozers! Who knew? Who can afford such self-subterfuge? As we consider that in these tightening times, here are some notes:

Note #1: product placement tie-in alert!
Note #2: BREAKING!! “….you’ll be rewarded with a mild ranch dressing flavor…”
Note #3: London’s Mayor loves the nightlife.

I haven’t visited the fam in Scotland to hit the pubs for some years now as Euro-daughter has been playing that role BUT I have some sympathy to this opinion from Alcohol Focus Scotland as set out in The Times:

Carolyn Lochhead, chief executive of the charity Alcohol Focus Scotland, took a dim view of the Tartan Army chanting “no Scotland, no party” while boozing in Boston’s bars. Lochhead, in a new blog, expressed concern that alcohol consumption is what makes Scots fun and that it had been woven into the public consciousness… Hamish Husband, from the Association of Tartan Army Clubs, said Lochhead was not wrong to suggest football fans took great delight in drinking exploits. However, he noted that the fans had given $10,000 to Hasbro Children’s hospital cancer unit and about $5,000 to the Rhode Island Pipers, and other good causes had also benefited.

The article also notes that Scottish overall consumption as measured in pure alcohol is down about 20% since just 2017. Which is good. (By comparison, however, the percentage reduction for party without Scotland remains at 100%.) Not so good, however, for the clinky PR folk seemingly writing for influencers and, you know, bots who seem to have landed, for now, on lumping together the concept that the young have “increased spending on travel, hospitality and alcohol in the past year” to fudge the drop in spending on drink. I hear young people today are spending more on [rent+drinking] as well.

Conversely and speaking from a more reality based reality, BMI continues to trace the drop in US craft beer sales with a fabulously named expert in the field, Bump Williams:

Retailers “already making some early ‘calls’ on shelf space for 2027 and unfortunately, craft once again seems to be on the block for losing more space,” Bump wrote. But Bump also took “closer look” at total craft to “hopefully persuade some retailers NOT to toss ALL craft into the beer-grinder of lost causes because roughly 1/3 of all craft brand families are enjoying some growth.” In aggregate, craft declining at steeper pace than total beer. Segment $$ sales down 4.6% while total biz down 3.6% in NIQ yr-to-date thru Aug 15. Tho that’s less of a gap than last yr when total beer $$ were down 3.2%, craft -5.2%.

Another sort of shift has been discussed by Eric Asimov, who regrets the move away from cabernet sauvignon – as it’s been tagged as something of your aged parents’ wine:

A lot of bad, unbalanced, over-the-top cabernet wines have shaped these attitudes. In the heyday of American cabernet sauvignon and Bordeaux, say, from 1985 to 2010, which coincides with the most influential period of those wine publications, the prevailing style of Napa cabernet increasingly became the high alcohol, sweetly fruity oak bomb. Many Bordeaux were so highly polished that any distinguishing features had been eliminated. These wines have rightly receded in popularity, though they still have their fans. Yet I fear their legacy has been to turn people off from the grape rather than the style. This is a shame, but it is not unusual.

As we see in craft beer, we might have been oversold the idea of the obscure or even the obscured as the new and improved. And Jeff may be describing a similar shift of sorts when it comes to the fresh hop beers of Oregon this year:

I noticed this trend last year, and it seems even more prominent this year: breweries using fresh hops as an accent in beers with high loads of conventional hops. The effect is a diminished or absent fresh hop note (in what may otherwise be great beers). During fresh hop season, I don’t merely want great beer, though; I want beers that glow green. As breweries begin to downplay the fresh hops, this worries me… brewers, use MAOR fresh hops! Make them glow green! 

Green! Speaking of which and finally, did you know that Nottingham was originally called Snotengaham?***  This is not a fact I picked up from this week’s feature in Pellicle by Pete Blackburn which, otherwise, provides a very interesting view into the revivial of Nottingham’s beer scene:

The famous Shipstones “Star,” and the Robin Hood silhouette of Home Brewery, proudly adorned those buildings. Streets hummed with the pungent scents of malt and hops, and hundreds of pubs carried their names. These breweries sponsored Nottingham’s two football clubs. You chose your team: Nottingham Forest or Notts County. And then, you pledged loyalty to “Shippo’s” or Home Ales. Those legendary local breweries are now long gone, joined in their demise by the much-loved Mansfield and Hardy & Hansons breweries. But while their landmark buildings, still standing, now serve other purposes, a new cast of beer and brewing advocates are putting Nottingham firmly back on the map.

Fabulous. And that is it for now. A goodly selection this week. Until we meet again, please look to Boak and Bailey’s postings on each and every Saturday along with the coincidenal and fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. They do put in the effort. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Scour the world for tips then let me know. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

*The article also explains that the “which images have a bicycle?” test is really used to train the borg behind the internets to read images like a human. And the “what letters and numbers are these?” test actual is used to correct errors in scans of books. The borg doesn’t give a shit about you and your identity confirmations. You are already on lists.
**The New Yorker, Aug 17 edition, page 20.
***Snottingham!! How mah-chur of me. What’s that? Well, sure, I don’t disagree. It could well be beneath you to be reading this sort of stuff.

The Calamitous Yet Humorous Dangers Of The Tavern In 1820s Nova Scotia

A few years ago – fourteen if you are counting – I posted a short post on about the “houses of entertainment” as described in Western and Eastern Rambles: Travel Sketches of Nova Scotia.* These sketches were originally published in The Nova Scotian in 1828-31 by newspaper owner Joseph Howe (and edited by my undergrad CanLit prof.) I was reminded of that 2012 post of mine when I was researching and decided to add something clever (and original) to this post I was writing about the description of Nova Scotia’s “houses of entertainment” of Pictou County’s as described in 1821‘s Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure to the Editors of the Acadian Recorder by Thomas McCulloch.** (That’s an old and largely gratuitous photo of Lorrain’s Hotel of Pictou built in the 1820s for dubious context.) But when I went to search for online discussions of the book by Howe I was presented with that old forgotten post of mine via Lord Goog. Shortcut achieved, thanks very much to Mr. 49 Year Old Me.

So…there are a few things to mention about the two texts. They are both columns in colonial newspapers. They are also by date pre-Victorian and in tone pre-temperance, practically speaking. By this I mean that they are Georgian and as such frame personal failure due to alcohol misuse as a matter of individual character flaw as opposed to larger societal ill. By way of example certainly at the frontier, we can witness the events of 12 and, I suppose, 13 August 1827 at Guelph on the celebration by the local great and good of the King’s birthday:

…all sat down and enjoyed a hearty meal. “After the cloth was removed,” toasts were drunk to everybody and every conceivable thing, the liquors, of all imaginable descriptions, being passed round in buckets, from which each man helped himself by means of tin cups, about two hundred of which had been supplied for the occasion… those who remained continued to celebrate the day in an exceedingly hilarious manner, most of them, who had not succumbed to an overpowering somnolency, celebrating the night too, many of them being found next morning reposing on the ground in the market place, in loving proximity to the liquor pails, in which conveniently floated the tin cups…

Dead drunk they were – but all for a good cause on a special occassion. Howe, just a couple of years later, avoided that sort of liquor soaking when he saw the madcap night life offered to the stage coach traveller who arrived in what was and is now still Kentville, NS:

…hardly do you get into the village before some long-legged Merchant pops you into a gig and gallops you away to church – or some other sinner of the same stamp gets you into his house, from which it is no easy matter to escape. You may run about, like Blair‘s soul, knocking at every outlet but in vain – Port stands sentry in one place – Madeira in another, while Claret, at the head of Bacchus’s light infantry, fairly cuts you off from every retreat…***

Kentville then was apparently as awash as Guelph had been – but was so on any given day. “Not for me!” says Howe. Still, McCulloch in his Stepsure Letters takes the question of boozing to another level of piety or at least ridicule.  His fictional essays are a satire on the rise and fall of various sorts of leading men in rural Pictou County, leaning apparently on the message in Proverbs 12:11:

He who works his land will have abundant food, but he who chases fantasies lacks judgment.

For McCulloch, it is not booze that ruins a life so much as an avaricious ambition that takes someone off the farm. That leads inevitably to ruinous financial decisions and, then, recourse to the bottle. Take for example the formerly sober and prosperous farmer Caleb Castup who, through his taking on new political ambitions, became the local commissioner of roads leading work crews to open up the forest…

… he was a man of some consequence… [and] … his respectability required himself to lodge in Mr. Soakem’s tavern. Here… he would spend his evenings with Mr. Soakem, and those who frequented his house. To make a long tale short, from being a sober, industrious man, he became a mere sot, and his boys are getting on after him as fast as they can. The farm, from neglect, became of no use to his family. The sudden decrease of our revenue, also, made his profit by the roads a mere song, when one day, as he was passing the sheriffs, that gentleman invited him to walk in…****

The joke about the sheriff inviting him “to walk in” is the same joke in many of the letters. Castup is incarcerated for his debts. But not after bringing ruin upon his family:

…home had no charms. At first, when he would come home to Mrs. Castup, intoxicated, she considered it merely as a state in which all are occasionally are, and it gave her no uneasiness, “But frequent repetitions. produced weeping and entreaties, and at last reproaches, And it was even said, though I cannot affirm it, that they proceeded as far as a battle. Certain it is, that, between poverty and quarrelling, home was a torment to them both. His family, also, and a fine family they were, are fit for nothing else but strolling about and drinking; and poor Mrs. Castup curses the day which made her husband a commissioner of roads…*****

Hardy har har. Note: she cursed not the day he took up drink but the day he obtained the position of a government official. Occasional intoxication gave no uneasiness. Note also: one of the fellow jailed inmates of Mr. Castup was Mr. Soakem the tavernkeeper himself. His story began similarly:

Like the rest of us, he began the world by settling upon a farm. At first, he was a hard working man, and soon made himself comfortable. But he was very eager to be rich, and he would frequently compare his hard labor with his little gains, as he called them.******

Greed, you see, is the curse of the farmer and as a result the cause of disaster for the farmer’s family. Ambition also makes you uppity:

…when Mr. Soakem was abroad, in order to maintain his reputation, he would stop at every tavern on the road, and show how a gentleman ought to behave. In the mean time, the young people were left to manage both the farm and the house of entertainment. This was more than they could well do; and, besides, not very consistent with sober and industrious habits…  travellers, understanding how things stood, passed on to the New Inn about half a mile distant. In short Mr. Soakem’s gradually became like the habitation of the wicked, he was rarely in it himself; his children were always strolling about ; and no traveller came near it; when, at last, one day the sheriff calling and finding him at home, remarked, that he must now be very lonely, and insisted upon introducing him to the company…*******

There are others in that company held at the Sheriff Holdfast’s house. The farmer turned logger. The farmer who becomes a merchant. The farmer turned gypsum exporter. All go broke and end up jailed for debt. Much to the chuckles of the agricultural readers of the Acadian Recorder who knew their place is at home on the land – and who knew how to mind their manners. And who didn’t stroll about! Another thing about that company of those jailed by the sheriff indicates to me that the key vice in all this isn’t the drinking. Consider this:

when I arrived at the sheriffs, I found Mr. Soakem, with eyes like collops, poring upon the cards, and the grog before him.********

…and also this passage when the author of these letters responds to the newspaper’s readers who are upset with him:

I am reviled at home as well as discredited abroad. Sheriffs lodgers, in particular, are very angry at what I have written about their grog drinking and Mr. Holdfast’s kindly treatment. So far from being sensible of this gentleman’s good offices, Mr. Pat O’Rafferty declares that he is a perfect Polyphemus; only he does not eat them, when ho has got them into his den.*********

The sheriff serves grog to the inmates! And lets them read the newspaper. And then write letters to the editor. How civil. One last thing. Both the Howe and McCulloch texts use the phrase “house of entertainment” in parallel with “tavern”, the latter being the descriptor last mentioned in my post on The Ports. It appears both are the accepted and even legal language of the time as this passage about the application process and an objection at the hearing from the local parson Mr Drone suggests:

…he applied to the magistrates. He told them that taverns are at best but necessary nuisances, and ought not to be multiplied. He bid them look round the township, and see how many had been ruined by living in their neighbourhood. And as he got on, becoming gradually more earnest, he said they had received his Majesty’s commission for better purposes, than to grant a license to every fool who chose to ruin himself and his family; that they were the guardians of good order; and, that, if they placed temptations in the way of the unwary, they were the partakers of other men’s sins; and might assure themselves that the gall and wormwood would be shared between them. Our magistrates have always been in the practice of giving licenses to all who request them. The town, they say, needs the license money; and, if the taverns increase too much, those who keep them will get tired of the business, They were, therefore, not well pleased that Parson Drone should interfere, and pretend to instruct them in their official duties, They never meddled with his preaching, and he had no right to interfere with them. Hence, partly at the solicitation of Mr. Soakem, and partly from opposition to the parson, the license was granted.**********

Hah! So the magistrates are mocked. The parson is mocked and certainly the greedy are mocked. That is the humour of the colonial Georgians of the 1820s. Thus endeth the sermon. Both for Parson Drone and, for today, myself.

*My physical copy is Howe, J, Ed.:Parks M.G.(1973) Western and Eastern Rambles: Travel Sketches of Nova Scotia, (U of Toronto Press, Toronto). I took Canadian Literature from Professor Parks of Dalhousie University in 1982-83.
**My physical copy is McCulloch, T. (1960) The Stepsure Letters, (McClelland and Stewart, Toronto). McCulloch founded Pictou Academy in 1816. It’s still the town’s high school and in the fall of 1979, my Truro soccer team of C.E.C. played them only for the game to be called when our striker, sick and tired of being hacked by one of the brave Pictonians, applied his black belt in judo to flip and hammer the thug. I played centre back and had a fabulous view of the incident. Mayhem ensued. Don’t asked me about the later Truro Town v. Pictou Town men’s league game from around the summer of 1984. Don’t!!
***Howe, p.78.
****McCulloch, p.36.
*****Ibid., pp.36-37.
******Ibid., p.29.
*******IbiddityIb, p.31.
********Idib, p.32.
*********IbbyDibbyDooo, pp.40-41.
**********(!!!)IbbyDibbyDone, pp.29-30. Drone had previously dealt directly with Soakem only to be told “Mr. Soakem em. was not convinced. Houses of entertainment were necessary, and might be very decently kept by religious people.” Please refer to Lamentations 3:19 on the whole “gall and wormwood” thing.

Your Back From The Dark And Dragging Your Butt Back To School Week Traumatic Yet Fantastic Thursday Beery News Notes

Purple rain. Or at least clouds. Leading up to the stormy night last night that brought hail over an inch wide to my pal at the far western end of Lake Ontario. Stormy also was the mood as this here website went offline for 24 hours (I know, I know…) But the friendly folk at HostGator (or a very capable A.I. bot) got it all fixed and repropagated for free. So here we are. September. The month of great songs. Do you remember? Sure, the days have trickled down. But I see you. And now you can see me again.

What has been going on? Well, the Minnesota State Fair has led to some fine journalistic reportage in the Star-Tribune on the adult beverages on sale in and or near the midway – including these beers listed under the heading “Ones To Avoid”:

– Lemon Agua Fresca Lager (Castle Danger): It’s never a good thing when a drink reminds you of when your mom made you wipe down the whole house with lemon Pledge cleaner. At the Ball Park Cafe.
– Midway Mango Rush Hazy IPA (Dual Citizen): A questionable combo of flavors without a fresh fruity pop. “It doesn’t even taste like mango,” Enriquez said. At LuLu’s.
– Peach Perfect (Boulevard Brewing): One of those fruity beers that tastes too much like bad fruit puree, not enough like a good wheat beer. And we’re not just saying that because it’s from a Kansas City brewery (but also: why?!). At the Hangar.
– Pink Lemonade Lager (Indeed): Looks pretty. Tastes vacant. At Dino’s Gyros.

Fruity gak! Apparently, fruit lagers are sitting somewhere between a blip and a thing in the UK, too, as Jeff has learned. But at another fair in another land, Jordan has the word from the booth – the token booth – where he has sets scene:

Last year, the booth I occupied in order to sell tokens had some issues. The roof was probably structurally unsound and when it rained, we employed buckets to catch the water that was dripping from the fluorescent light fixture. This year, as a small mercy, the roof is solid and the threat of electrocution is smaller… I’m leery of digital systems at beer festivals. One of the festivals that makes the circuit tried RFID wristbands and while this putatively allows you to check the balance, you need specialized equipment to do it. A stand with a reader or a trip to the booth or vendors trained enough to look that up with their equipment without charging you the balance. I think it permits too much variability, and variability becomes a quagmire of unforeseen problems. 

You know I learned today that there is a wide range of options one can select from when one puts the phrase “a man has time to think…” in Google Search looking for a pithy quip.**

Time for law. File this one under the heading “how the mighty do fall” as bidding has been taking place for the intellectual property rights related to the former craft beer darling Rogue Ale. The bids received on this opportynity offer are pretty modest as noted in BMI:

Six competing bids for Rogue IP came in higher than the UK-based media agency Silver Scope Media’s initial $400K offer on Friday, Aug 21, ct filings show. A Calif-based entity called Electrend, Inc led the pack at $500K followed by RosieBertFranco LLC (PA entity) and Sickard CP LLC (Nevada) at $450K, and Coulter Ventures LLC (OH entity), Thomas Investment Group LLC (Oregon entity) and STG Bev Holdings (CA entity) at $440K each. 

There is apparently a claim on the table that was described earlier in the month by Stephen Bradley in VinePair:

Oregon-based Valley View Winery filed an objection to the parent company’s intent to sell the IP, as it claims it maintains a “perpetual license” for the rights to Rogue’s wine and wine-based beverages. The winery’s filing states that it trademarked Rogue in 1983, though they reached a settlement agreement with Oregon Brewing in 1997 that gave it rights to the brand’s beer products.

So any value may be affected by the shadow on title due to the earlier trademarking of “rogue” in the booze trade. Still, if that only applies to wine the remaining value of the beer as set by the bid values seems pretty measly.

In other legal matters, you may have heard of this theft of beer… which also raises questions:

“What we discovered was it was just a bad actor essentially who came in and pretended to be the person who was supposed to pick up the beer,” a spokesperson told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner. “It wasn’t the person who was supposed to pick up the beer and then they drove off with it.” Pabst also had a message for the thief: “Pabst is officially starting the clock now – you have exactly 18 days and 44 minutes to return our truckload of beer, no questions asked.” The number is a nod to the company’s year of founding: 1844. The company is also offering an unspecified reward for the return of the shipment.

Questions? Why would they want it back? Probably just to destroy it as there is no chain of command that could justify selling of it. Who would bring the beer back? The truck and trailer will be worth many times the cargo. Return it? To get arrested?? Why would the criminal turn themselves in by driving the truck? It’s all gone. It was all gone in the first 24 hours.

Stan’s latest edition of Hop Queries came out end of last week and provided this bit of accurate and honest commentary:

When new varieties or new hop and hop-related concentrated products are introduced the best brewers will use them to translate what they can imagine into something new and delicious. Some brewers will get excited, treat them as toys and overuse them, release beers that are one dimensional, and—we hope—do better next time. Some brewers will make mediocre beers and some lousy beers. They might be one-hit wonders, but they’ll still be lousy beers.

For the double, Stan also posted about the poor hop harvest in Europe: “For the second time in five years, hop production across Europe has tumbled as a result of an intense heat wave and below average rainfall.” Check that out for a country by country breakdown.

History corner. Ron this week on the question of the “K” displaying some pretty amazing skills:

In 1890, Whitbread brewed just 6,000 barrels of KKK out of a total of 381,000 barrels. Of which 210,000 barrels was X Ale.  Which is what most Londoners were drinking. These beers are pretty much beefed-up versions of KK. Sometimes, like at Whitbread, being parti-gyled with KK. When brewed single-gyle, the hopping was often heavier in KKK. Like KK and X Ale, KKK began down the path of darkness in the final decades of the 19th century. Who really knows why they became darker?

I know Ron is correct in these statements and I do reach back in the archives* for clarifications where needed but… how does he keep it straight?

Who is saying what online… and why? David J. guided me to this article, “an exhaustive investigation by Stephen Buranyi into the economics of restaurant influencing” that raises some serious questions:

The most striking thing I learned was that very few influencers have been able to translate their views into steady paydays. They battle to be invited to exclusive launches, while also trying to hawk their imprimatur to brands for potentially lucrative partnership deals. It is clear that there is a secretive trade involving some influencers taking under-the-table payments from restaurants in return for positive coverage, blurring the line between entertainment and advertising, and certainly violating the UK’s advertising standards rules. 

Secret trade? Under-the-table payments?!? My #1 serious question is what the hell is wrong with breweries that they are not in on this scam? There was a little blurp of influencers in the beer world a few years ago and then, *burp*, nuttin’. At least nuttin’ with any influence.  Or interest. Or readership. Sad.

Speaking of which… more law. You need to watch what you say online these days… at least in Canada. Turns out a new form of negligence is being recognized for extreme behaviour on line as we see in the ruling in Miller et al v. Ahn et al, 2026 ONSC 4805 (CanLII) released on August 21st about a very ugly pile on flame war:

…the court in Caplan reserved the tort for the most extreme conduct, requiring communications so outrageous in character, duration, and degree as to exceed all bounds of decency. In this case, the court adapted the tort into a mechanism for holding influencers responsible when they target an individual. Mobilizing the audience, approving their conduct, and refusing calls to stop the attacks were all treated as part of the defendant’s communications conduct. The ruling is just an interim determination based on a largely uncontested record, but the court concluded that the harassment claim was very likely to succeed at trial.

The clarity of the ruling was no duobt helped by the object of the online harassment being herself a lawyer. Would the same be true if the target was a big brewery brought on by a herd of influencers?

And the ever fabulous Anaïs Lecoq is back with the lead article this week at Pellicle on the phenomenon of premium French butter:

…Maison Bordier makes one of the country’s most sought-after butters—even though it only accounts for 0.01% of France’s annual butter production of 400,000 tonnes—by both fine-dining establishments and hungry tourists. On social media, hundreds of people share their discovery and tasting of Beurre Bordier each month, along with Beurre d’Isigny from Normandy or Beurre Dupont from Northern France.  In Paris, a famous gourmet food shop called La Grande Épicerie sells 200 different brands of butter; in two years, sales have increased by 300%. In July of this year, The Butter Shop opened in the 15th arrondissement, its owner deliberately choosing an English name to appeal to tourists. Both stores have capitalised on the trend by offering to vacuum-seal the butter so it can better withstand the flight home.

Coincidentally, one time science columist on TV Joe Schwarcz posted a reel on FB with a side by side of Canadian v. French butter in a blind taste test. Here are the results.

Finally and at the other end of the economic scale, thanks to Drew I learned of a new bar in Washington DC that is offering less as a business strategy:

To try to make the economics work, Rube says they buy bottles that retail under $10. Their rail liquors—a brand called Recipe 21—cost them around $7-$8 per bottle. Then they often get deals with distributors and find random bottles with deep discounts, like Fireball Blazin’ Apple or a pre-batched Porn Star martini that was 70 percent off. Most of it is available as shots, although the bar has also been using mixers like Harris Teeter colas (because they were on sale), and Sunny-D, because it’s way cheaper than actual orange juice. “People ask for limes and lemons. It’s like, this is not a salad bar. This is literally a $5 bar,” says Rube.

I like it. That is it for now. I trust your nerves have calmed down given this was not a blog fatality, just a hiccup. Is that how you spell hiccup? Others will be in the know. Always alive with info, look to Boak and Bailey’s postings on each and every Saturday along with the coincidenal and fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format – this week there was talk of crumpled beer tanks!  Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

*See for example from 2013: “I wish I had separate output figures for the K and X Ales. But unfortunately Whitbread just lumped together XX and KXX, XXX and KXXX and XXXX and KXXXX. XXXX and KXXXX were discontinued in 1844. Not surprising, seeing as they only brewed 101 barrels in 1843 and 52 barrels in 1844. The output of XX/KXX and XXX/KXXX both increased as the decade progressed, but still lagged way behind the popular X Ale. A beer with no Stock Ale equivalent.” Lordy!
**I quite like this one from The New York Times of 27 September 1939, section E, page 41: “Make no mistake; the ball players knew the money was on the line. In the excitement of going after a grounder, tearing toward the fence for a liner or sliding into a base, it’s different. At such times the player is going for the ball or the base and nothing else in the world matters at the moment. But there are lulls in the action when a man has time to think, and here was a lull in which all the Cardinal and Red players in uniform were thinking of the same thing, the big money at stake.“

Quick Note: An Hour At The Portsmouth Tavern, Kingston, Ontario

An old friend from work is joining me in the ranks of we, the gratefully unemployed and idle pensioners. To mark the event, I was invited on a small pubcrawl the other day playing my role as, I suppose, the ghost of retirement to come. A happy time out sat at long tables filled with glasses and pitchers of beer beside friends and former co-workers. We ended up at the Portsmouth Tavern, established circa 1863… which is pretty early for Ontario. Pre-Confederation. Once upon a time, I wrote about the drinking spots in my fair city including the older Queens Inn (est 1839) and Royal Tavern (est 1851) both of which have had breaks in operations in recent years. “The Ports” continues to serve beer after 163 years.

Me, I grew up in Nova Scotia, that eastern province that is almost entirely encircled by the Atlantic. The common word for public house back there back then was tavern or “tav” for short. Like the old Midtown Tavern in Halifax. Tavern is the same word used by Thomas Raddall in his 1965 portraint of the city Halifax: Warden of the North. The word originally was supposed to indicate a better sort of establishment – with tables and wine – to distingushing taverns from, as Raddall describes in the 1760s:

…the other side of Halifax, the brothels, the drinking dens, the underworld which nourished itself on the vices of the troops and the fleet.*

Kingston was established as a military town up after the American Revolution on the site of French Fort Frontenac (1673-1759) as something of a bookend to Halifax, serving as the westernmost military bastion of British North America deep inland here at the eastern tip of Lake Ontario. When I moved here in 2003 I was expecting a similar tavern culture but modernity had intervened. There were plenty of drinking spots but instead there were mainly bar restaurants called roadhouses, big screen sports bars, ditto band dance bars, swell cocktail bars and even the first brewpub in Ontario. Not a lot of the same sort of beer pounding taverns that I was familiar with back in Nova Scotia – or even up in the lumber towns of the Ottawa Valley where we had also lived. Places with communal tables, cheap beer, cheap food and a clientel that reached across all strata – college students, military, business folk. Young and old. Tavs.

That night earlier this week, the Ports was clearly a tav. I had been there before when we lived nearer. Even once after a college football game when the Queens University bagpipe band led fans in, pipes a’blaring. That was loud.  But this was loud as well. Not with music, just the happy talking… err… shouting I suppose. My ear were actually ringing the next morning it was so pretty loud. Still, not nuts. It was only 9 pm. A tav should be loud. It was also very well staffed. Packed but clean, well lit with empty glasses cleared away quickly. We had had dinner at another place earlier, where the bar was stacked with dirty glasses and the cans were rank. It was justifiably dead.

When I paid my bill on the way out, I got called “hon'” by someone less than half my age. “We good” she said with a thumbs up. The beer was a buck cheaper too. We good.

*Raddall, T.H. (1965) Halifax: Warden of the North, (Doubleday, New York), p.64.

Already? The Last Beery News Notes Of August 2026?!?! Really???? Lordy…

A question: where do you pee after drinking beer? The sociological question came up in a conversation touching on the ethics in Ontario, Ireland, Germany and Portugal last weekend. And the associated question of “what and where are the woods?” was canvassed, too. That image to the right? It’s a Portuguese treed setting. Where peeing occurs. Seems a bit… open. Beer based peeing also occurs here in Germany. I think I can see a road in the background there… and maybe a shop. I have always wondered about where one may pee after drinking in the Netherlands in 1986 where guys just walked out of the door of the pub and peed on the front of the building. Seemed a bit too much overlap in the old Venn diagram. But I am Canadian. We do pee in the woods but what qualifies as the woods here is a bit more woodsy. Further field observations of the more tasteful sort will be received in the comments.

The other big topic in Canada is, of course, trade war v.3.1 which popped up again this week in fine style… which has led to more than a few becoming obsessed* with certain American products on the shelf. One branch of a grocery store chain in pretty small town eastern Ontario was spotted selling US wine:

A ban on the sale on all U.S. wine, beer, spirits and seltzers in Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) stores went into effect in March 2025 in response to American tariffs. LCBO is the sole wholesaler of alcohol for licensed restaurants, bars and grocery stores in Ontario. In a statement, Loblaw, the owner of Your Independent Grocer, says the bottles have been removed. “We recognize the importance of supporting Canadian businesses in this climate and understand why this incident raised concerns. The wine was put on the shelves without the approval of the store owner and once identified, it was removed immediately,” a spokesperson for Loblaw said in an email. It’s unclear how long the wine had been sold at the store. A viewer emailed CTV News saying they saw the wine in stock on Sunday.

The rules about these things are a bit unclear as the government run retailers and wholesalers have removed it from the shelves but it’s a bit unclear about what private licensees can do with earlier stock. It was older stock, right? I unkindly remembered the eastern Ontario phenomena of unilingual English labeled products from American sometimes seen on a quiet aisle of regional independent corner stores. Bootleg BBQ sauce is a favourite. Smuggled chocolate bars too. Yum.**

What else is going on? Well, Jordan finally lifted his head up for air and explained his silence for the last few months:

I was a Field Operations Supervisor for Statistics Canada for five and a half months and didn’t really have time for blogging. The nature of the gig economy means that you have to hang on to all the other jobs that will outlast a contract position, so there I was working what was ostensibly a nine to five position while teaching in the evenings and leading walking tours when they were booked conveniently. For the first couple months I continued to edit and co-write Ron’s new book, Brewed In The Family.

Busy busy busy. He also shared recollections of Texas Brown ales past, including Bellwood’s Grizzly Brown. I had a few of those with Jordan at the taproom with Ron P. back in 2014, detailed evidence of which evening can be found here. He did not mention at all where he may or may not have peed.

Elsewhere, it was Sausage Saturday when Martin and herself were in Newport the other day where the service was tiptop – as was his advice on etiquette:

Mrs RM called it before I did. “That’s off“. It was. If starting a conversation with strangers is difficult, taking your pint back undemonstratively without drawing attention to yourself as a CAMRA can be even more daunting. Quietly does it, use “end of barrel” instead of “off“, and offer the extra quid or so for the Thatchers. Which would have been the sensible choice to start with. Sausage and chips and peas for six quid fifty the only sensible choice, and frankly the onion gravy would cost you that in some pubs. Marvellous stuff. The landlord was briefed by the landlady and came over to apologise for the Butcombe, and the clip turned round. They’re advertising Thornbridge on the pump today; I’d give it a go.

Speaking of top pub food, Katie went once again to the Highland Laddie in Leeds and found her corner of heaven:

Ordering food at your leisure from a bar menu that reads like top restaurant business is exactly what I want. My tartare came with its egg yolk jam and tendon crisps and just as I hoped, I was transported to Flanders. The fire baked ham and house brioche dinner rolls was a beautiful pub dinner. I dipped my chippies in the egg yolk jam on my plate and found myself in the depths of comfort I get on my birthday when I take myself off on my own to a cafe for eggy chips and a pot of tea. The vindaloo devilled eggs reminded me of our family preference for using curry powder in our egg mayo butties. Again — deep comfort, delicious luxury.

And travelling a couple of steps further north, I like this review by Chitra Ramaswamy of a Scottish pub, The Keelson, and the wonderful chicken to be found there:

It’s official. Rotisserie chicken, a hipster craze that swept across London, has voyaged north of the border and landed in Leith… Through the buzzy boozer we go, with its many manly textures of wood, framed drawings of nautical knots, television screens (don’t approve) and SFA memorabilia (didn’t expect) to the back, where the small kitchen and restaurant section are housed. Nice, but we prefer the sunny, more pubby front. Can we move? Of course, says our friendly server. She doesn’t bat an eyelid when we ask to move again to a bigger table, to fit all the food we’ve ordered… my god, the succulence of the meat. Leg, wing, thigh, and breast have been expertly carved, the meat juicy and the skin crisp from incessant basting, smoky, perfumed with garlic, woody herbs, and vast amounts of butter. 

A fabulous retort in relation to the “non-place” observation from last week. So, too, were ATJ’s comments on how pubs can be an antidote to rootlessness:

That got me thinking about belonging. I lived in Cambridge for six years but that was not long enough for me to feel as if I belonged to the place. Then I recalled meeting an old girlfriend in 2024 from my time in the city who had since emigrated to Australia. As we visited some of our of old Cambridge pub haunts, she mentioned a couple of times that she was a Fen girl, and I thought of how that despite her long sojourn in Australia she still felt an identity.

Probably due to the WCs. And there was news in The Guardian about the tough position CAMRA finds itself this year and fingers are pointed:

For centuries, the wooden real ale pump has been the hallmark of a good British boozer. But now problems are brewing for the proper pint, as the Campaign for Real Ale has seen its membership sink to an eight-year low and its accounts show it is firmly in the red, making an £800,000 loss last year… Outside the Devonshire pub in Soho, central London, there is an ever-present horde of drinkers downing pints of Guinness, a stout made by the multinational company Diageo. But the landlord and co-owner Oisín Rogers says: “Real ale is all I drink”… Camra is calling for the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate the big beer companies’ stranglehold on the market.

More now about me. I received an alert from Sayre Piotrkowski who wrotes about a post at his newsletter Beer & Soul responding to my own thoughts on the general shrinking interest in craft:

Broadly, he argues that craft beer has lost ground since our 2019 peak, fewer people care, and the industry shouldn’t comfort itself with optimistic narratives about a turnaround that may never come. While Alan is replying to a piece that calls for beer to be treated as a cultural beat rather than a business one, with exclusively market-driven reporting, he is not lying: craft beer production today is well below its 2019 peak. But the leap from that fact to “fewer people care” is much harder to defend. An industry’s production volume and a culture’s significance are not the same thing. In fact, I think the obsession with the former is one reason we have become so bad at talking about the latter.

I don’t agree with his disagreement with my comment but (i) that’s just me and (ii) taking on the question of meaning over measurement is an interesting approach. One problem I would note with his argument is he appears to seek to then measure meaning by first suggesting then counting up other categories beyond sales volume – other ways people experience and enjoy good beer, leading to this observation:

People love their local breweries for all sorts of reasons, but no one’s esteem changes with the number of barrels contributed to the national production total each year.

This would be nice if it were true – and perhaps it can become true – but the entire arc of US craft beer’s story has been embued by the trade with an obsession with first marking and then obfuscating the actual meaning of actual stats.  Good for Sayre for seeking to move away from this failed construct.

Speaking of messaging, Eoghan shared this response to new health warnings proposed for booze labeling in Belgium:

Belgian brewers have launched a campaign against more forceful health label warnings – from “Alcohol misuse damages your health” to “alcohol damages your health”… Alcohol misuse does damage your health, but alcohol also does. There is no “safe” amount, similarly to cigarettes (a better comparison than the one they use – soft drinks). I’d question the fixation of brewers on this point – will the new label really make a difference?

And Boak and Bailey have been out on the road – the railroad – according to their Patreon update:

The following day we had a few hours in Brussels before catching a sleeper. We revisited L’Ultime Atome, which really doesn’t have much for beer geeks these days. The beer list is short and the food is pretty mediocre… We then got on a train for a long time. About 300 small naps later, via Amsterdam and Berlin, we arrived in Prague just in time for lunch. Our first beers were in an international brunch place, and we don’t even know which beers we had because they didn’t tell us which was which when they brought them to the table, but after 15 hours on a train they tasted damn good.

Good. No word on the facilities on the train. Here’s some notes:

Note #1: I thought Jake was being a bit rough until I realized he was talking about somthing else.
Note #2: “Brewers don’t have to have much skill anymore…”
Note #3: It’s the weirdly over the top statement that always kills my interests in what someone in the booze trade might be trying to say.
Note #4: “Not one knows” yet… available resources.
Note #5: is Stone now really really dead or just really dead?

A surprising bit of news in The Times this week about the date rape drug being used against men and in some unexpected contexts:

While spiking can lead to a further crime, such as rape, no additional offence is reported in 55 per cent of spiking cases, making it difficult to know what motivates perpetrators. Of incidents in which another crime did occur, men were more likely to experience theft or blackmail, while women were more likely to be sexually assaulted. Dr Amy Burrell, who researches crime and policing at the University of Birmingham, said: “I’ve seen all the combinations: females who have spiked males, males to females, females to females and males to males. Spiking is often a facilitator for other offences but it also happens in and of itself.” The majority of spiking takes place in environments associated with alcohol, like bars and nightclubs, however “mutual spiking” among friendship groups is also very common.

I found this report very disturbing and not something that would have occured to me as possible in the 1980s of my youth… then I remembered the chemistry major in my undergrad who spiked the orange juice dispenser at the residence cafeterian one weekend morning, apparently just to watch people get all sleepy over their French toast.

Finally, back to a more sensible topic, Andreas has shared some thoughts on the formation of esters and phenols in the brewing of hefeweizens, including this tidy summary on how esters are managed:

The main phenol is 4-vinyl guaiacol (4VG). It is formed mostly enzymatically from its precursor, ferulic acid, and to a small extent (10-15%), also thermally at temperatures greater than 80°C. This precursor is located in the malt (in barley malt more so than in wheat malt), and is brought into solution at an ideal temperature range between 40 and 45°C (104-114°F) and a pH range between 5.8 and 6.1. So to promote the formation of phenols, mash in low, do an extended rest between 40 and 45°C, and use at least 40% barley malt in your mash. If you want to minimise the formation of phenols, mash in high, and ideally use as little barley malt as possible. 100% wheat malt mashes are possible if you use rice hulls or straw as a lautering aid.

We are big fans of straw as a lautering aid in the eastern end of the Great Lakes… for over 200 years. And that is it for another week. We will have to see if there is a Boak and Bailey posting on Saturday along with the coincidenal and fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format – this week there was talk of crumpled beer tanks!  Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

*See these comments on Facebook: “So today YOUR independent put American booze back on their shelves. Unbelievable! They claim it was done without the Johnsons knowing. What a load of shit. Just another reason to not shop there” and “If I want American booze then I will buy it“! Lordy!!
**Apparently no one in the US administration checked to see how much of their buttwipe supply comes from Canada. A lot apparently.

Your Always Accurate Yet Often Questionable Beery News Notes For The Last Lazy Days Of August

Say what you like. Beer is pretty good but, be honest, toast is the best. See that there? My yellow tomatoes on cream cheese mixed with my green onions, chives and basil. Pennies worth of seeds, just months of waiting. And watering. And weedeing. All for toast. I once even made cream cheese. Bought the equipment on line maybe 25 years ago. It was great. It was a couple of kilos worth, too. Never made it again. You think a beer hobby or home brewing is a hazard to your girlish figure? Cream cheese making laughs at home brewing.

What’s up? For Everyday Drinking, Sarah Sioli wrote about an interesting problem with clinky drinky third spaces:

There’s a paradox anyone who cares about wine, gastronomic culture, and cities will recognize. When I go out to eat and drink in Barcelona, I almost always have to choose between two things I love: the kind of bar that feels like home, and the kind of wine I actually want in my glass. In this city, those two things rarely live under the same roof. It’s happening in many cities where bars are still part of daily life… And here’s where the paradox lands… The wood has become stainless steel. The kitsch portraits are gone, replaced by minimalist reproductions and photo prints. The crowd has become the modernillos—Spanish for the “cool kids.” The waiter speaks English first These places are what the anthropologist Marc Augé called non-places… 

Exactly! Non-places. Sounds a lot like those IKEA-inspired taprooms. For an opposing view, Ron’s thoughts on Canada’s VIA rail service have conveyed valuable information.  His trip into Quebec City even more so:

Alexei has found a pub with a decent beer selection nearby: Café au Temps Perdu. We head there.  There’s a supermarket nearby. But we’ll leave that for on the way back. Au Temps Perdu is a lively neighbourhood bar. We sit on the terrace. As the sun sets behind suburban houses. Dead relaxing, is how I would describe it. The air is still and the light golden. I get a Noctem Catnip IPA, the kids have cider. And some food: beef dumplings, fried calamari and poutine. The poutine is really good: rich and deeply savoury. It really does seem to be better in Quebec. The gravy is almost like brown sauce, in a very good way It’s a lovely summer evening and customers drift in and out, the crowd becoming noticeably younger as time drifts on. I get an espresso martini for my second drink. What the hell, I’m on holiday.

What else? Well, a lot of newspaper columns end up as higher forms of listicle – which is readonable given the general readership – but this column by Pete Brown in the Times of London provided us with a very suscinct history of Italian Pilsners:

In 1996 an Italian brewer called Agostino Arioli set up a new brewery, Birrificio Italiano, just outside Milan. He was a huge fan of the hoppy German Jever Pilsener, and wanted to brew a copy. It didn’t work, so he tried the English practice of “dry-hopping”, where raw hop flowers or pellets are added to the beer after fermentation to intensify the fruity flavour. That didn’t work either. But he had accidentally created a beer that he loved — he named it Tipopils (Italian for “kind of pils”). Exhibiting it at a brewing competition in Munich, he met Matt Brynildson, an American brewer who liked Tipopils so much he went straight back to Firestone Walker in California and made his own version. 

Speaking of lagers, Boak and Bailey shared a bit of a study on the place of cask ale in an English heat wave – but included some thoughts of a nice colder lager:

We think it’s that lager has less going on or, rather, that its complexity is fairly subtle. In hot weather, what you want is water but better, and a good lager can be like that. It won’t make you chew on anything, or overwhelm your nasal apparatus before you’ve even taken a gulp. It has enough bitterness to provide an invigorating bite but not so much that it takes even the slightest effort. This is all perilously close to the language of beers that are ‘drinkable’ and ‘refreshing’ but in hot weather those qualities do become rather more appealing.

I’ve been told my own complexity is pretty subtle. (“Too damn subtle!” read the marginal notes on much of my marked school work.) Speaking of B+B, on their Patreon footnotes last weekend I commented on their thought that once a beer becomes too different it arguably ceases to be beer. My comment was that “scotch taping non-beery things onto the category of “beer” dilutes statistical certainty but it also conveys a lack of, what… authorship.” IE: if you make sometihng new, name it something new. The recent obituary of wine writer Matthew Jukes pointed out an example of this:

Known in the trade as “Jukesy”, he was adored by Australians because he did so much to champion their wines in his books, journalism and broadcasting… He also ventured successfully into business, responding to changing trends in alcohol consumption by creating a range of zero-alcohol drinks that could “replace wine for a wine-savvy palate”. His recipes were inspired by Haymaker’s Punch, a cordial made by farmers in the 17th century using leftover fruit and vegetables steeped in vinegar. Soon his “Jukes Cordialities”, having started in a kitchen under a Battersea railway arch, were winning orders from Michelin-starred restaurants around the world.

I mention this as it affirms a usefulness in taxonomy that the booze world largely ignores – giving each thing its own name. I might be more interested (errr… even slightly interested) in booze replacement fluids (BRFs) if they were called “cordialities” or, you know, anything other than the thing that they are not. For example and by way of illustration, consider this statement in a recent post at BMI:

Notably, non-alc beer accelerated from week to week, up 15.7% for wk thru Aug 2 vs +14.7% in prior wk thru Jul 26, making it one of the only alc bev segments to do so…

One day soon footware and car parts will also be included as “alc bev segments” to further plump the stats.

Almost relatedly, in Pellicle David J wrote about Stirchley Wines & Spirits of Birmingham, which in 1989 became one of those fabulous pre-“craft” beer retailers, a now largely unsung foundation of the beer beer movement:

…Krishan made sure not to overlook British breweries—although he confesses he generally found the era’s offerings quite samey—and stocked outliers like Worthington White Shield and Samuel Smith before supermarkets had extensive beer ranges. He dealt directly with breweries like Shrewsbury’s Salopian, in some cases before they were established, and was especially excited when new ones opened in Birmingham. The key to Stirchley Wines’ enduring success, though, was always offering a range of beers that appealed to all types of drinkers, whether they were interested in the modern, the traditional, or rare imports. Today, the locally brewed Batham’s Best Bitter is the shop’s single bestseller, but Birmingham’s Attic Brew Co. is the most popular brewery.

Update: I forgot to mention how much I enjoy the beer specialist shops, something that the pervasive nature of craft has perhaps stomped upon. Twenty years ago, I had to impose a rule upon myself that I would not could not physically touch any bottle for the first ten minutes of a visit to Finger Lake Beverages. One had to control oneself.

And did you hear about the mid-1900s Belgian brewer who may have been doing better than the taxman was told? The Guardian reports:

The hoard, which includes gold coins, nuggets and numbered bullion bars, was stashed in a bag in a bricked-in cellar wall beneath the grand villa originally built for the brewery’s owner, Theophilus Van Assche, in the late 19th century. Brewing on the site began in 1899 and ceased in 1970, and the listed property – the wrought-iron gates of which still bear the initials “VA” – is being completely renovated by the social welfare organisation CAW Oost-Vlaanderen to create new offices and housing.

Apparently, some of the ingots are marked in a way that indictes that it is no older than the 1960s so it is not like it’s Nazi gold. Less dramatic was another find:

A woman has claimed a free pint of beer after finding a coin and a mysterious message hidden in the wall of her house. The card, discovered by Ellie Mead in Bicester, Oxfordshire, revealed the cache was left there in 1971 by electrician David Judd, who promised “one pint best beer if penny returned”. A Facebook appeal traced his daughter, Helen Russell, who revealed he was now aged 92, living in Devon and happy to honour the offer. She said: “I do know that there are others all over the place but he won’t tell me exactly where.”

Speaking of odd things found at breweries, Will Hawkes on the twentieth annivesary of the end of Young’s brewery in the latest edition of London Beer City:

Well, how many breweries are also menageries? Young’s had not only 20-odd Dray Horses, but goats (cleverer than horses, SJY reasoned, they’d notice a fire in the stables before the drays), donkeys (a pair, called Bonnie and Clyde, found emaciated and nurtured back to life), a Dorset Horn Ram (‘a living mascot’), 17 geese, hens and peacocks. 

And here’s a thumbnail illustrating an all too common sort of interaction in the beer discourse from over at LinkedIn. I am playing with LinkedIn by posting pictures of my garden and my birdwatching instead of making up shit about my career path. Screw with the construct I say. Anyway, have a look. In response to a pretty light newbie 101 sort of infographic on Pilsners a certain Mr. M.D. Ferguson (apparently of the hops trade) takes the time to write “completely inaccurate on the hop part“… as if one looks to infographics for accuracy. Then someone called Dr. G. Spedding Phd (apparently of a booze lab) took the opportunity to redirect eyes… to an article HE got published in a trade mag a few months back about flavour wheels and not about distinctions among Pilsners. All of which conveys a disinforming disrespectful cocaphanic mess. None of which passed my mind’s eye without hearing the voices of Beavis and Butthead.

Speaking of butting heads, here’s an interesting angle on “Gulf War III, Trump Trips Trap” and the news that the US Navy has been struggling to provide supplies to the ships, especially the USS Lincoln – as reported in the NYT:

By tradition and Navy regulation, the commanding officer of a warship can request a “beer day” for their crews when they have been at sea for 45 straight days or longer. Given the Lincoln’s time at sea, the crew would have been eligible for five beer days already. A spokesman for the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which covers naval operations in region and would authorize beer days, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday about whether any of the ships participating in the Iran war had requested them.

Apparently Wee Donnie didn’t see fit to provide “toilets that work days” so I would expect that beer was not high on the priority list. In the 1980s, my home of Halifax NS had periodic visits from the NATO fleet and you could go on board. I remember on a very large US ship a few crew laughing about how the other navies allowed booze on board. I remember on a very small Canadian ship a few crew laughing about how, during the war games out at see a few days before they sank the very large US ship.

Booze and war have also had an effect in Russia with news laws coming in to deal with smuggling:

Under the new regulations, bringing just two bottles of premium vintage wine or high-end champagne without declaring them can trigger criminal penalties. Illegal transport of high-value wine in personal luggage has remained common practice, with Federal Customs Service data showing attempted illegal alcohol imports reaching 413.5 million rubles ($4.5 million) last year, up from 266.7 million rubles ($2.9 million) the year prior… Former government economist Oleg Vyugin noted that due to complex transport routes and rising tariffs, “European wines in restaurants cost like an airplane wing,” adding that “if you want to drink good wine, you have to spend everything you earned over the last two months, or be an oligarch.”

Pity the poor oligarchs. One last thing. How do you feel about subliminal A.I. text? Has anyone checked for that in beer writing? What am I talking about?!?!  Here is a portion of a discussion of Elliott v. New York Bariatric Group out of New York’s Judicial District of Ansonia/Milford:

The concealed text was a command addressed to machines, set under the caption and repeated at the end of the document… The plaintiff was telling whatever model touched the document to make its output agree with him and to treat the clerk’s prior ruling against him as an error that needed fixing in his favor. A second filing that same day, Docket Entry #178.00, carried an abbreviated version of the same hidden instruction. In the cybersecurity world this is called a prompt injection attack.

This was spotted care of Brendan M. Palfreyman, attorney in Syracuse NY who has a noted focus on brewing law IP but has been sharing how A.I. is being applied in (and is offensive) to the courts. It’s something like self-promoting search engine fodder. Could that tool defeat any integrity in beer rating sites, for example? Couldn’t be worse than LinkedIn.

As I figure out how to add subliminal messaging to this weekly update (buy Al toast!), please check out Boak and Bailey posting on Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format.  Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

Your Sweaty Dog Days Edition Of These Beery News Notes For Mid-August

Well, it’s gone quiet around here again. The Euro-branch of the clan has moved to the other end of the lake before taking the skies and heading home. But first they took in a game Wednesday between the Jays and the Sox, as illustrated. $17.28 CND with a bit of a tip for that Bud. Lordy. No wonder I stick to high end rare vintage ports. Long time readers will recall that we are a Red Sox family due to the Boston branch of the clan so it’s good that the seats up there are empty around the fam. Hissing carries only so far when one is in enemy territory.

Enough of that. There must be some news to share. Let’s see. First up, how about some old beer… really old beer:

A sealed bronze bottle placed in a tomb in northwestern China more than 2,000 years ago has yielded something archaeologists rarely encounter: not a stain or microscopic residue, but 3.74 liters of surviving liquid.

And upon the news of some not quite as old but still old beer, Liam shared some fine responsive research related to the discovery of a bottle of Guinness in a 162 year old shipwreck and word of some plans to recreate something from the contents:

As to the beer itself, a lot has been made in the recent news regarding the plans to harvest the yeast from the bottle in order to rebrew the beer. This would be impossible to do from just regenerating or even matching the yeast for a number of reasons, not least being that it probably contained not one yeast strain but several, including less conventional brewing yeasts such as Brettanomyces and Lactobacillus… In order to explain why the yeast is just a small, if important, factor in the beer’s recipe we need to look at what exactly constituted Guinness Extra Stout in the 1860s, and luckily, we have a good and reliable second-hand source for that…

Liam goes into some detail to show how both the ingredients and processes of the time differ greatly from those used today making a replication perhaps impossible. Gotta love a post with twelve footnotes and the trust they provide.

And with similar authenticity, Boak and Bailey are fine purveyors of quality positivity and that integrity serves them well in their piece this week on how they have seen some solid professional behaviour from the staff in pubs lately:

We’ve long said that the main thing we want from bar staff is to feel as if they’re engaging with us like fellow human beings. We try not to be annoying, no doubt we fail from time to time, and no doubt customers collectively are an infuriating bunch. But people who are able to come to each interaction with the slate wiped clean, assuming the best, make for the best bar people… [W]e also get the impression that this particular barperson is adept at matching the energy of the customer: want to talk, they’ll talk; want to keep it business-like, that’s fine, too. This is another great skill and one that requires a significant degree of social sensitivity.

That’s a great point. Both the high energy guy and the quiet inside joke clique can get irritating quickly. Staying with news from the tavern, there’s some surprising legal news out of Germany as youth may not be having its way any longer:

The German government said Wednesday it would scrap a legal provision that has allowed 14- and 15-year-olds to purchase and consume alcohol with their parents. The government said the abolition of so-called “accompanied drinking” would “protect young people from the considerable health and social effects of alcohol consumption”. The minimum age for drinking beer, wine and champagne is 16, rising to 18 for spirits and other harder drinks.

Fourteen? Just to be clear, a form of this sort of thing in the family home is also one of the little known permissive laws of Ontario* – but I don’t know anyone who would exercise that right with 14 year olds. Full disclosure: I assure all that I am quite sure I fully abided by the law with the greatest care during the tender teen years in my own life. Definitely.

Note #1: a desperate attempt to coat tail on yesterday’s PR?

What else is going on? Well, out on the road… or rather the rails… Ron’s maple-laced holidays in central Canada with his sons continues with reports from both Ottawa and Montreal published now. It’s always interesting to experience your area through the eyes of another. At one of the capital’s Royal Oak pubs he found yet another disappointing IPA:

We kick off with onion rings and poutine. Which are pretty good. After the first round I switch to whisky. I’ve had enough of hazy IPA. “All the IPAs seem to be sludgy here in Canada.” I say forlornly. “That’s what the kids want nowadays.” Andrew replies. “They could have at least one normal IPA for oldies like me.” “Any excuse to switch to whisky, eh, Dad.” Alexei remarks cynically. “It’s their fault for an uninspiring beer selection.” “Not yours for being a pisshead?” Alexei asks. “Fuck off.”

He’s encountered the sludge at a number of spots. The trail of sludge, this vacation of his. Educational for we Canucks, as The Bard hissell would have wanted.

Note #2: is “mid-strength” some PR committee’s phrase for “weaker”?

Now some politics. First, click for a “no standing pub” joke.  See, people are reacting to suggestions that “standing pubs” or “vertical drinking” in London get banned. I think the phrase really means “standing around outside the pub while drinking” pubs but happy to be corrected. Speaking of correction, Westminster City Council has released a myth bustin’ communiqué:

You may have read media reports suggesting Westminster City Council is planning to ban people from standing up in pubs, or ‘vertical drinking’. This is completely untrue. There is not, and never has been, a plan to stop people standing in pubs to have a drink. We want people to enjoy our fantastic pubs and bars, and we want them to do that safely. Our licensing consultation is asking people about the best way to ensure our venues can serve the millions of people who visit London and the West End every year.

Note: the word “in” is carrying some weight there in that press release. What about out on the pavement? The Telegraph‘s daily newsletter included some responses on the issue this week including these two observations:

Alan Hanna added: “Some of us have spent the best hours of our lives standing outside pubs moving between groups of friends, sharing rounds, smoking and having a wonderful few hours to let off steam before going home. I am so pleased that my adult children and their wives enjoy the same. This is one of the highlights of London.”

Not everyone was a fan, though. One reader countered: “Pavement boozing directly outside a pub is one thing but, human nature being what it is, people push the boundaries, literally and metaphorically. The anti-social aspect affects nearby residents, and why should their quality of life be considered less important?”

Being dull and helpful (in addition to sludge brewers) we don’t do this in Canada. I have done it myself, however, in Syracure NY in the before times when one went south for fun and freedom but it’s a bit unnerving when you don’t know the unwritten rules about when and where it is OK and when it’s not.

And still more sides of the politics of beer have been discussed on both sides of the Atlantic this week. In England, real or cask ale has become associated with the right wing of the political spectrum. With a H/T to David**,  Michael Deakin of Caskapital found an ominous note in an SNL UK skit:

The clip showed a dystopic future in which Nigel Farage had become Prime Minister. He sat at a desk in No.10 flanked by St. George’s cross’ and to his right was a hand pull beer engine, from which he helped himself to a decidedly flat looking pint of golden ale. Whilst this scene is disturbing in a number of ways, the presence of the hand pull really made me think. How often have I seen Farage portrayed like this, and when did real ale become an icon of fascism? 

Err… cause fascists prefer their symbols and icons given the associated distasteful substance? And at the western end of the USA, Jeff discussed the holding of a political event at a local bewery for a national Republical leader and Trump ally:

…Trap Door is not some rando brewery. They are a darling of the increasingly robust Vancouver corps of breweries, and have won tons of medals, including back-to-back golds in the fresh hop IPA category at GABF. Whether this will, ahem, take the shine off the brewery long term is something we’ll have to wait and see. Many of you know my politics, which I haven’t hidden. Nevertheless, I’m a little uncomfortable with the idea that the mere act of hosting a political event becomes such a polarizing act for a brewery. They have become community meeting places, which is fantastic, honestly. Hosting political events is a democratic act, and I am loath to punish a brewery for it. But in this case, the owner is a political actor, and he’s using his brewery to advance a political agenda. 

I don’t know if I can separate the two like that. But that’s me. First, I don’t really care what the politics of a brewery or pub owner are… as long as they aren’t any sort of authoritarian dictatorial militaristic criminal cabalist of any stripe. I am also sure I do not want to share space with any political rally that doesn’t not match my personal preferences – and even then the rally, if we are being honest, really should be held someplace else. Frankly, I don’t care for any sort of group meetings taking over part of a pub or restaurant or shop or, you know, parking lot in which I find myself located at any particular time. Pubs especially need to be reserved for disorganized noisy wild drunken fun or quiet less drunken yet still disorganized fun – or, sure, disorganized events falling somewhere in between. But no pamphlets. No speeches. No thanks.

Speaking of the holding of little meetings to get everyone on the same page, this preemptive messaging over on LinkedIn from the BA last Tuesday was pretty odd. Apparently anticipatory angst about Wednesday’s Gallup polling on US alcohol use was expected to be so neg for the booze trade that the poll needed to be discredited before it was released! As you know, rooting for booze is a weird thing… but if that thing is your job I guess it’s gotta be your thing, right? Still, for a booster organization that’s seen consumption of its particular sector of booze drop almost 20% since 2019, it’s also a pretty weak stance. I mean, I have been on trade association boards, radio station boards and counselled many government and administrative bodies and I can’t imagine ever recommending directly mocking obviously correct stats. Find another way in at the root cause, if you need to. Or accept the numbers and advise accordingly, perhaps. It’s big boy pants time. But in the booze trade? Never.

Finally, here’s an interesting development. We are told that as of 2 August, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act now has new provisions at Article 50 which obliges those using A.I. (to develop text and images along with other content) to disclose that activity if the context is available in Europe. Even if the author isn’t in Europe. For me, that means I have to look out for readers like The Brew Nut to make sure things stay pure. So… could cutting an pasting wicked (pittui!!!) A.I. text in one of the paragraphs quoted above leave me at risk under the new law? Well, fortunately for me acknowledgement is something of a defence, if not an excuse, so I will be adding my note right here right now to confirm that I have no idea if the above cited sources violate EU law but offer no comfort that they don’t. In fact, I don’t believe any of it. Not a word. You shouldn’t either. Beware! Take heed! Govern yourselves accordingly.

That’s it for now. Another shortish week as I gained back the full array on napping spots in the house. Until next week, as I doze please check out Boak and Bailey posting on Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format.  Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

*Section 34 of the Liquor Licence and Control Act, 2019 prohibits underage drinkgin but states this at subsection 34(5): “This section does not apply to the consumption of liquor by a person under 19 years of age who consumes liquor in a residence or in a private place as prescribed by the regulations, if the liquor was provided to the person at that residence or private place by a parent of the person or by a person having lawful custody of the person.“
**And for a rare triple play!