These Be The Beery News Notes For A Week Of The Big Smoke

It’s been a weird week. A low pressure system stuck over the Gulf of St. Lawrence has driven smoke from massive forest fires, first, in Atlantic Canada and, then, in Quebec south down upon our fair city, well… really our region and, yup, right down into the American northeast. That’s Monday evening up there. Tuesday the hazard rating hit 11. And no one made a Spinal Tap joke at all. Sports fields shut, tight throats and all outside workers called in. Now everyone is following the smoke forecast. And you can too with this helpful anxiety raising app and its realtime disaster info. So all backyard activity is pretty much suspended which means sitting around with a beer in hand has to wait for the winds to shift. My near neighbour Spearhead Brewing posted this on Facebook Wednesday:

Our thoughts are with those affected by the devastating forest fires. Due to the hazardous air quality in Kingston today, we have made the difficult decision to close our patio. However, we warmly welcome everyone inside our taproom, where we prioritize your safety. Kingston’s air quality is currently classified as ‘extremely dangerous’ by the government…

In equally uncheery news, The Guardian ran an article this week which laid out a few of the factors behind UK craft beer closures:

“The craft beer market became heavily overpopulated over the last decade. The cost of living crisis now means many of these brewers are fighting for a place in a shrinking market. Some of them will not make it.” Small breweries also often suffer from limited routes to market, lacking proper distribution channels to consumers, and are reliant on taprooms and supplying to local bottle shops. Those restrictions have limited the turnover of many craft breweries, meaning that they were not able to break even.

The Yorkshire Evening Post ran a set of old photos from one Leeds suburb and included this snippet of 1930s-esque fact:

Dantzic Brewery on Regent Street in Sheepscar was best known for their black or spruce beer, a drink which is similar to stout in that it is made from roasted malt. The name Dantzic was taken from the town in Germany – now Gdansk in Poland – which was famed for brewing Spruce beer and also the high quality of oak casks which were used. The brewery was owned by Joseph Hobson and also made ‘vintegg’, a ‘delicious’ egg wine.

Yikes! Not necessarily relatedly, Jessica Mason shared the news in Drinks Business that Guinness 0.0 on draught would be hitting Irish pubs – leading to questions as to it’s capacity to support a session.

Diageo has been urging pubs to take the 0.0 brand on draught and its teams of are now working to install separate pipes for the 00 brand into venues that want to stock it. One County Louth publican who is planning to have the 0.0 draught version installed, told reporters: “The drink is very popular with designated drivers who feel they can still have good craic drinking a zero zero and it almost tastes as nice as the real thing. The drink has become a big hit in a very short space of time and now Guinness wants to roll it out everywhere. The reaction to it from the punters is very positive and the 00 obviously has a huge future and is currently the number one non alcoholic drink.”

Whether it’s a beer or a nice cup of tea, you need the zip to go round after round, don’t you? I just can’t see no-alc beer being a sessionable thing. These things are based on the active ingredient. Who chugs decaff? Oh, that person. Yes. I suppose. KHM has other thoughts:

This is the notorious line whose first release was followed by a global recall as it was contaminated with food born pathogens. A poster child for the dangers of taking beer’s chief preservative out of the equation.

What else is going on? I wade through the week’s newsletters by email I’ve filed away… but none really attract a thought. All that self-declared beer expertise and nothing much to speak of. Now, do get yourself on Eoghan’s Like a Little Eel subscribers’ list. Not so much about beer but lots of good writing. Oh, and read Boak and Bailey’s review of Desi Pubs by David Jesudason which really is two reads well worth your while:

It makes you itch to visit Southall, Smethwick or, closer to home, Fishponds, and go somewhere new. Perhaps somewhere you’ve previously ignored because the signals it sent weren’t ones you were primed to read.

Fishponds? Speaking of sessions in pubs, Stan noted one thing in his weekly news notes which was a quote from Jaya Saxena‘s piece in Eater which got me thinking:

The bars that seem to be thriving are ones that managed to embrace the breadth and depth of the LGBTQ+ community. The kind of bar that used to serve only older folks or maybe only young people, or only white people or only men, those bars sometimes seem to struggle. I think bars that have figured out how to embed themselves deeply in the community, maybe being used as a different kind of space during the day than during the night, seem to be thriving.

Thinking back to my bar rat days, I thought how odd the idea of bars which “embed themselves deeply in the community” might have been to me back then. If bar is a third place it is also to a degree antithetical to the general community. Narrow nowheresvilles which offers a perfect alt-reality. Why do you want to be in there? Because you don’t want to be out here. Wouldn’t you like to get away? You want to go where people know people are all the same. You want to go where everybody knows your name. Because in the broader community you are a nobody but in a bar you are with those same people who know you and are like you. Yup. What a miserable idea. No wonder these are the places that are struggling and dying. Viva the big raft bars. Viva!

Speaking of affronts to cultural identify, Eric Asimov wrote an interesting article for The New York Times on how tyrants and dictators regularly destroy vernacular wine cultures:

The Soviet Union routinely sought to transform the local winemaking customs of its constituent republics, discouraging, for example, the winemaking culture of Georgia, and instead creating vast state vineyards that could supply enormous amounts of wine for the Russian market. Likewise, in the Alentejo region of southeastern Portugal, the tradition of making wine in clay talha, amphoralike vessels, largely disappeared in the mid-20th century as the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar pushed the country into centralized wine production. In Spain under Franco, regional methods died off as the government channeled wine into bulk production.

And speaking of cultural appropriations verging on colonial hegemony, Pellicle ran an excellent article by Paul Crowther on whatever Mexican lager is supposed to be. This passage is particularly apt on the meaninglessness of these sorts of things:

…in beer writer Mark Dredge’s book A Brief History of Lager, he suggests that Mexican lagers are more like pilsners, and don’t have anything to do with Vienna lagers. There’s an implication that there are pilsner and Vienna style lagers produced in Mexico, but that there is no such thing specifically as ‘Mexican lager’. “We brew all sorts of lagers in Mexico: pilsners, Viennas, bocks,” Mariana Dominguez of Cervecera Macaria, based in Mexico City, tells me as I try to get to the bottom of this Mexican lager mystery.“What about Mexican lager? Is there such a style?” I ask. “I think it’s something that White Labs [a yeast manufacturer and wholesaler] made popular,” she explains. “They are selling a yeast supposedly propagated from a Mexican beer as ‘Mexican Lager Yeast’. No one in Mexico really uses this as it’s too expensive.” “We’re not brewing ‘Mexican lager’, we’re brewing lager.”

The layers of appropriation are rife. Outsiders upon outsiders layering. American craft style square-hole aficionados and yeast hawkers building upon the unfortunate Hapsburgs and their German industrialist fellow travelers who stood on the shoulders of Spanish colonizing imperialists. Isn’t Mexican beer Tejuino?

Apparently there is oddly at least one unexpected winner in the fall out from the Bud Light brand botch:

Coors sales have accelerated from 6.3% growth over the latest 52 weeks to about 13% growth over the past two months, Spillane said in analyzing Nielsen’s data. The gains have been fueled by demand for Coors Light and Miller Lite. “It’s difficult to determine the duration of the boycott, but it has already lasted longer than industry executives anticipated and appears likely to impact the July 4th holiday,” Spillane added. “Molson Coors appears able to service the demand spike due in part to supply chain improvement (part of the revitalization plan) and learnings from COVID supply chain stress.”

And there are more details on that situation noted last week where branches of the 7-Eleven convenience store chain have been licensed in Ontario as restaurants:

The licences will allow 7-Eleven to serve alcoholic beverages with food at tables in the dining section of each store. Customers are not permitted to take any drinks off the premises. After 7-Eleven applied for the licences in 2021, the AGCO launched a formal review called a Notice of Proposal for all of the company’s applications. That’s a more rigorous process than what the AGCO goes through for the vast bulk of licence applications. The AGCO put out Notices of Proposal for less than one per cent of the nearly 7,000 liquor licences it issued in the 2021-22 fiscal year, according to its annual report.

Prepping for the impending regs allowing corner store beer sales, one presumes. Speaking of Ontario, The Agenda a news magazine produced by TVO ran a 30 minute panel on the state of craft beer in our dear province with some familiar old faces on the show.

And finally – and no doubt inspired by the research shared last week into the dainty powder rooms of Philly dive bars – the image Will Hawkes shared the image of one of the grottier urinal troughs I’ve seen, a vision that takes me back to a bleak Sydney Mines elementary school boy’s washroom circa 1971 when I was dropped into what felt like the grim 1940s after moving from the modern, cool and hip Toronto suburbs. Fabulous.

That’s it! That’s enough from me. It’s back to you for now. And as per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon, the newer ones noted in bold:

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things – including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast. There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids. And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!*

*And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. The Fizz died in 2019. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

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