April 2026 – A Good Beer Blog

Your Mindblowingly Fabulous Beery News Notes For The Start Of The Best Two-Thirds Of The Year

April showers bring May flowers yet they are at the heart of what makes the most cruel month. I don’t get it. It’s good that we can put the whole thing behind us. Along with the payment of what was dues on the taxes. Done. And stuff like will it be a blizzard warning or one for a tornado? Now it’s time to put the feet up a bit. Check out what’s going on, like seeing who is passing through in the migration. Saw these Red-breasted Mergansers down at the shore this week. Bet they’ve dealt with their tax filings. Yup, best to tra-la for th new month starting tomorrow. Tra-la-ing is not to be dismissed. Shout it out or even sing aloud. Try it as an excuse on your boss in a meeting, for that particularly difficult clerk at a store or even on your in-laws! An all purpose response to any situation. Until, of course – WHAMMO – June shows up. Back to the grindstone in June.

Speaking of the seasons, Knut got a bit poetic in his wanderings around the hopyards of Poperinge in Western Belgium:

It’s springtime, even in northern Europe. I have harvested the first edible plants of the season, aromatic wild garlic. German restaurants are preparing for the Spargelzeit, when fresh asparagus dominate the menus. But beer ingredients also follow the seasons. From a beer perspective, the fields of barley are turning from gray to green. And in a belt from the English Home Counties via Flanders and Bavaria to Bohemia, the hop fields are showing their first shoots.

I had no idea that hops grow 20 centimeters per day. He’s got even more facts and figures on the start of the hop ag year. Jen Blair was in a different place but, still, also full of the revelations when she considered the airport Cheez-it which led to some interesting thoughts about sensory perception:

You can imagine my delight when I boarded another flight a few months later to discover that Delta now offered Cheez-Its as an in-flight snack. A few years ago, Delta partnered with the then Atlanta-based SweetWater Brewing Company to create an IPA specifically formulated for flight, with reduced bitterness and increased perceived hop aroma. I wondered if they had done the same with Cheez-It. And here we have arrived at the Cheez-It sensory experiment. I had an upcoming flight to Colorado for World Beer Cup judging, and so did another friend flying in from Montana. I texted her to buy a bag of Cheez-Its at the airport, but not to open them because they were for Cheez-It sensory when we met up in Colorado.

She even proposed the identification of a “Cheez-It equilibrium” point in the atmosphere which is, obviously, quite excellent. I am tagging this under the “Science” category. More science now… but with a political twist… out of the UK with the news… with a sports twists… that the country is running out of carbon dioxide… cause by a global crisis twist:

Fans of the beautiful game shouldn’t panic about the beer running out during this year’s World Cup — yet. Business Secretary Peter Kyle tried to reassure Brits Thursday that they’ll be able to enjoy a pint during this summer’s football tournament. It comes amid reports officials are drawing up contingency plans for a shortage of the carbon dioxide used to make fizzy drinks as the Strait of Hormuz closure bites. Directly questioned about whether Brits will be able to get a beer during the summer World Cup, which starts on June 11, Kyle said: “At this moment, this is not a concern for our economy, okay? I can reassure people of that.”

He “…tried to reassure…” Hmm… Not a concern “…at this moment…” Hmm… Commercial CO2 appears to be a by-product of gas and oil production so we up and over here have a bunch. Still sticking with the serious objective stuff, The Western Producer recently shared an update on the market for Canadian malt barley exports:

… about a year ago, Canadian barley prices started to fall as China resumed purchases from Australia after a lengthy trade spat. That pushed a lot of Canadian barley out of the Chinese market. And then Canada harvested a bumper crop of barley in 2025. Farmers produced 9.73 million tonnes, a 19 per cent improvement over the previous year, putting even more downward pressure on prices. “Prices have been a lot more competitive in the global market,” said Watts. At the same time, French malting barley prices climbed higher due to a short crop in that key exporting nation. Those events, combined with years of continued market development work, encouraged Colombia to reconsider Canadian supplies, and they were happy with that decision.

International harvest intrigue reigns. France is looking at another rough spring 2026 as far as barley planting goes, too. That flat red line on that graph under the thumbnail tells the tale. And the competition is ahead of French farmers. On the other side of the planet, the Austrialian 2025/26 crop is “23 percent higher than last year and 21 percent above the five-year average.” Meanwhile… geopolitics can get one into some very odd places. As you think on that, here are some notes:

Note #1: Bun photography.
Note #2: “Rub my Dad’s bottom….”
Note #3: “…surprising health benefit…”

You know, I think the craft beer recovery needs to be measured in the returned of a staffed up BA because I really don’t get where anyone is going with the “return to 2012” narrative. But Dave Infante reporting from the Craft Brewers Conference for VinePair gives another angle on the boost to mood:

Survivorship bias dictates that the brewers that made it to CBC 2026 are likely to seem the most bullish; after all, if they weren’t, they may have stayed home to save money and manpower. At the risk of sounding indelicate here, I also suspect that the segment’s years of closures have helped cull the herd of both excess numbers and outsized negativity. A dying brewery can only die once, after all, and with outfits that were never built for this market getting pushed out of it, those that remain stand to benefit from more focus and less vicarious angst.

We are told that history is written by the victors but, I guess, we have to ask in this market what is “victory” when overall US craft production is down 9% over the last two years and down 17%* since hitting a peak in 2019? Speaking of questions… is the use of “lifestyle” as a descriptor ever not a red flag? Consider this PR blurb about a new beer-like substance:

Carlsberg Britvic premium beer marketing controller Rebecca Allen revealed that the 4.5% ABV beer is strategic in answering the trends of the moment and admitted that “the timing reflects a broader shift in drinking culture, where boundaries between categories are increasingly blurred and consumers are more open to hybrid, lifestyle led propositions”. Allen told db: “1664 Rosé takes its name from its distinctive flavour profile, a refreshing berry flavoured beer. The ‘rosé’ cue reflects both its taste and its visual appeal, positioning it as a lighter, fruit-forward beer.”

What style of life is being referenced? And where has that style led the life of the consumer in question? Speaking of style, Ron has given us a few background insider sorta notes on his presentation flow while on the road, working it in Chile:

For my talk, I speak a couple of sentences and then the interpreter translates them into Spanish. It interrupts my flow a bit. But does give me a chance to drink some beer while the interpreter is taking. My talk is about Irish Porter and Stout. I should probably update it. I wrote it a while ago and have since got hold of a lot more Irish brewing records. In particular, examples of heading, the sort of Kräusen used in Ireland. I get through my beer so quickly, I have to request a refill. That’s a first. Just making sure my throat doesn’t get too dry. Wouldn’t want to get hoarse. Usually, I only get to take a sip or two, as I keep rattling away. When I’m done, I sell a few more books. Which is good. I’m nicely building up dosh in my PayPal account. Dolores will be so happy. Why have I never brought books with me to sell before? Because I’m an idiot. That’s why.

When Dolores is happy, I am happy. Conversely, there’s bad news out of the other end of Lake Ontario as the Toronto Festival of Beer has gone under** and has left creditors and suppliers holding the bag according to CTV News:

Applying to work for the festival was costly, Kowalik noted, as she and her partner spent $1,000 on the entry fee and an additional $200 on liability insurance. She says they both took time off from their day jobs to work since the festival started on Friday. Over the course of the weekend, Kowalik said they went through all 20 cases of beer that they brought up, amounting to a total of just over $2,000.

The story shares a twist on beer fest tokens. Because the festival sells them and not the breweries, the money paid for the beer tokens does not go to the brewers. Kiss it goodbye. Anyone owed money can call into to the bankruptcy meeting this afternoon at 3 pm. But seeing who else is on that list of creditors, the news may not be good. For $2,000,000 in liabilities there’s only $8,000 in assets.

On the Burton Union question, we have had Laura H in (t)DB on challenges posed to the survival of the Marston brewing kit and also providing CAMRA with a backgrounder on the history of the system. Now, a Mr. M. Curtis has visited the part of the whole which became lodged at Thornbridge and reported back:

Fixed to the head of each oak barrel is a large, cast iron “X”, painted black. If this seems familiar it’s because, for a time, an illustration of three such barrels, stacked in a triangle formation, formed the logo of Marston’s Brewing Company in Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire. Still in operation, today Marston’s brewery is owned and operated by British-Danish conglomerate, Carlsberg Britvic. In January 2024 Carlsberg Britvic—then known as the Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company—decided to retire the remaining four working union sets at Marston’s. Once used to brew what was once some of the most well-known ale brands in the country, including Marston’s Pedigree and Owd Roger, the brewery’s website famously used to state: “No Burton Unions, No Pedigree. End of.” Now, it seemed certain this storied piece of British brewing history, first invented in 1838, was due to be consigned to the dustbin of time and memory.

I was going to say that it is too bad that the United States has little similar interest in its brewing history as we could see the mid -1800s pontoon room of Taylor of Albany recreated even if in part but then was saddened to see that the link in my post of 2016 to Martyn’s at Zythophile failed. It’s all there at the Wayback Machine site. But the key word search does not seem to work and Martyn did not use a URL system that included the date. So you can hunt out his post at your leisure. In the alternative, I can only direct you to the work of a couple of rough sorts, Messers Gravina and McLeod, at page 80 of their opus on, in and abouts Albany which you can review under that thumbnail to the right… well, your right my left.

Lastly, following up on observations on the word “critic” in beer writing a couple of weeks ago, The Times also appears to be confused as the sub-header for one story this week describes Pete Brown as “our critic” and then he himself states as follows:

Of all the arguments the beer world loves to have, there can’t be many topics more divisive than JD Wetherspoon pubs. Critics attack them as a refuge for those too old and/or drunk to mind the harsh lighting. Supporters say this is just snobbery, and what’s wrong with cheap beer? Critics believe the beer is cheap because it’s bought “short-dated”, or about to go off. Supporters ask where else can you get a meal and a pint for under a tenner now? The thing is, both sides are right. Except that the beer isn’t short-dated and never has been.

“Critic” is not a synonym for detractor. Pete isn’t the one who created this. But as Stan reminded us, the “…critic’s job, nine-tenths of it, is to make way for the good by demolishing the bad” as it was put by Kenneth Tynan. What is it about general beer culture that is uncomfortable with the common form of two handed discussion and intelligent criticism with a bit of peer review thrown in for good measure? Oh well.

That’s it for now. Report upon your tra-la-ing in the comments if you like. Until we meet again, please check out Boak and Bailey who are posting every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “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, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November 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. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. See you in May!

*26.3 bbls in 2019 compared to 21.9 bbls in 2025. What’s the degree of collapse that will send a message to the PR trade, one wonders.
**Sixteen years ago, Jordan shared his thoughts on the unappetizing event.

Your Sunny Warm Bountiful Springtime Beery Beer Notes For A Satanically Chilly Late April Week

On Monday as the sun came up I thought I might do a little weeding in the garden. But something was strange. Wrong even. The top of the soil was like rock. Solid. The hoe just cracked it intopt large chunks. Then I realized it was under zero. Oh. My. Lord. A month into spring. Of all the feels (uses fingers… denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) I only hit the second and the fourth. Lordy. It was up to +4C by the time we got to noon on Tuesday. Can this please be the end of these freezy frozies? Please?*

What is happening… elsewhere where it is warm and cheery? Well for starters, when in Rome, you may want to do what The Beer Nut does as he has some great observations from his recent trip there:

In an age of beery uncertainty — when the consensus of the craft era is, if not completely dismantled, then at least creaking with important bits falling off — it’s nice that some certainties remain. I’ve developed a newfound appreciation of the beers and bars I discovered in the early years of this blog, and before, which are still operating despite the barbarians being inside the gates. So it was especially pleasing to arrive into Rome and find that two of its fondly-remembered institutions are still going, same as ever.

Also warming is the south of England where we have a pair of stories. First, in The Guardian we read of a boom in one corner of the drinks trade:

While Britain remains far down the list of global wine producers – behind countries including Uzbekistan and Tunisia – it is the fastest-growing wine region in the world, according to the property group Knight Frank. It reports the area of planted vineyards in the country has quadrupled since the turn of the century. Langham’s estate is part of this boom, almost tripling in size since 2009 to span about 34 hectares (84 acres) of the 1,000-hectare site. Increased wine production means the company has outgrown the converted farm buildings it was using to store barrels and bottles and it has just invested £2m in a new winery which should be completed by the summer.

Then, Mr. R. Protz shared his thoughts on one aspect of that boom writing for CAMRA’s publication What’s Brewing:

Here’s a fact that will freeze the blood of all beer lovers: there are now more vineyards in Kent than hop farms. Since the 16th century, the county of Kent has been at the heart of hop growing. It has what the French call terroir – the right balance of soil, sunshine and rain to grow the finest hops. The soil in the Garden of England is sandy and loamy. This means it retains rain and moisture and enables the hops to grow fast and develop the piny, spicy and peppery aromas and flavours for which English hops are famous. The decline in hop growing has been calamitous, not only in Kent but in other major cultivation areas such as Hereford and Worcester. In 1962 8,200 hectares were devoted to hop growing. By the end of the century the number had fallen to 1,060 with just 45 hop farms left.

This leads to the question of the relative profitability per acre of hops destined for brewing compared to grapes destined for wine making. In 2019, the ag mag South East Farmer stated:

“The first stage is to talk about the elephant in the room, which is profitability,” said Duncan. “Establishment costs, depending on vine density, is £8,000 to £10,000 per acre and farmers should be looking to establish 20 to 30 acres to justify the investment into viticultural machinery. If you choose the right site and plant the right varietals, clones and rootstocks there is no reason not to be aiming to grow three to four tonnes per acre. Payback, which includes the cost of establishment as well as the annual running costs in the early years, is expected after year nine. Fruit is selling at approximately £2,000 per tonne at the moment and it costs around £3,000 per acre to produce. So if you can turnover £6,000 per acre, the gross margins on an acre is £3,000 and that is well worth waiting for.”

Note that the phrase is “gross margins”. Now, this might be a question I should have put to Stan but what is the gross margin for hop growing in southern England? The UK Department of Enviroment, Food and Rural Affairs has plenty of info on the standards that apply to hop farming but not a lot on economic expectations. One sees that an acre may produce 1,000 pounds of dried English hops on average (or half a ton) and that recently a ton retailed in 2024 for a little over $9000 USD or £12,000 pounds (or £6000 a half ton acre.) Similar. But what is the gross margin? Also… it might be a error to even compare. In both cases, the acreage is so small that it’s unlikely the vineyards are directly muscling out the hop yards. Yet one is an expanding market while the other isn’t. Thoughts on the resulting… err, actual… numbers much appreciated.

Moving from the question of “what’s in it?” to “what’s it in?”, Tim Holt shared a link this week to an article in the Royal Society’s Notes and Record after he received his hard copy of the publication. The reason? About a couple of months ago, the Royal Society reported on receiving Sir Isaac Newton’s wooden pint flagon:

In this article, we first tell the story of the wooden pint flagon by considering Newton’s college friendship with John Wickins, the latter’s appointment as rector at Stoke Edith, the relevant histories of the Wickins and Hussey-Freke families who owned the flagon, and public notices and exhibitions of the artefact in the nineteenth century. This evidence allows us to track a circuitous yet plausible itinerary for the drinking vessel from Trinity College to Hannington Hall.

At the time of Newton’s use, a pint flagon filling would be 1d at Trinity College and while about 2d in Glouchester according to a contemporary reliable source* – though that may refer to a quart which would make sense. It is also interesting to compare the vessel to two Tudor examples we looked at, oh, about thirteen years ago. Also wooden but not nearly as fine as Newton’s, having a conical shape rather than new more recent on in the form of a small barrel. Less stable in form for perhaps a less wild context?

Going further back in time, Merryn guided us to an re-examination of a 1927 study of Italian ceramics dated to between 750 and 725 B.C.:

Gas chromatography and mass spectrometry analysis of residues in the gourd detected organic compounds commonly found in fermented fruit juice, perhaps from grape, apple, or pear. No tartaric acid, a component of wine, was found. Tests conducted on the gourd residue also identified heated pine resin and mastic resin, which were believed to have medicinal properties.

Which leads to the interesting idea that alcohol may have been prized early on as a medicinal rather than just the jolly juice. And going even a bit further back, the Times of India reported on a Danish study of an ancient Sumerian tablet:

A small clay tablet has offered a remarkably human glimpse into life 4,000 years ago. Researchers studying ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions in Denmark have identified what may be the world’s oldest known beer receipt, a written record of beer supplied for workers in the Sumerian city of Umma.Instead of chronicling war, kings or religion, the tablet appears to document an everyday transaction. The discovery was made by scholars from the National Museum of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen during a fresh review of museum collections. Experts say the find highlights how some of the earliest writing systems were created to manage trade, labour and resources.

So while beer probably didn’t caused civilization, it may have advanced the need to record the growth of civilization. Notes time!

Note #1: Speedy cocaine-laced salmon.
Note #2: Authorities in India claim ABInBev part of cartel.
Note #3: What’s a Chester?
Note #4: Scratchings!

Speaking up there of Stan, this month’s edition of Hop Queries is out and he asks this question:

What hop variety shares her name with a hop disease?

Figure it out yourselves. I won’t ruin the fun. Conversely, we have two no fun tales tales of failure today from the big names in craft circa 2016. Turns out that the lingering BrewDog legacy includes a number of forms of debtor deadbeatery:

Brewdog went under with £550m of debts. The administrators have now filed a (long) list of creditors on the Companies House website. Among them is Lords cricket ground which is owed £420,000. Since the debt is unsecured Lords are likely to get less than a penny in the pound back of what they are owed, around £4,000. Another London sporting venue where Brewdog got the beer franchise (and still have it) is West Ham’s London Stadium at Stratford. Here the debt, £12,000, is much smaller….

Innis & Gunn, it turns out, stuck their 200 business partners with less than 4% of that pile of bad paper. And, in the UK, BrewDog’s brother from another culture, Stone continues to see its legacy fade at least in Virginia:

The beer-making operations of Stone Brewing Co. are not long for Richmond as the California-based brand is being sold for the second time in four years. This week industry giant Duvel Moortgat USA announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Stone Brewing from Sapporo Holdings, the Japanese brewing conglomerate whose US division bought Stone in 2022. While the Stone brand and beers will continue to exist as a subsidiary of Firestone Walker Brewing Co., a California company owned by Duvel, Stone will no longer have a manufacturing presence in Richmond. Its sizable production facility at 4300 Williamsburg Ave. in the city’s Fulton area will become a full-time Sapporo USA production facility, Sapporo-Stone CEO Zach Keeling said in an interview on Monday.

Trade friendly insider commentators will no doubt call this retraction an consolidation. Hope springs eternal. BAer fans of Stone on the East Coast are now looking forward to… mmmmm… stale older beers. And Boak and Baily shared another aspect of the retraction in last weekend’s footnotes on Patreon:

We used to take much more of an interest in US craft beer than we do today. When we first started blogging, back in 2007, most ‘craft beer’ was American and we spent a lot of time and money hunting American craft beer around London. As the British craft beer scene grew its primary influence was America and there were times when it felt like Brits cosplaying Americanness… These days, though, there’s less American beer around in the UK and British craft beer feels like its own thing. It doesn’t feel as if what’s happening with craft beer in the US has much bearing on what’s going on here, even if there are echoes of the same trends and cycles between the two scenes.

We are retracting into our own scenes, deglobalizing. Perhaps as the Great Creator intended. Who benefited from international craft? Perhaps what is more attractive are the local habits. Relatedly, there were some interesting observations from Will Hawkes in London Beer City about the confusion someone from away might experience when entering an English pub:

A French family of four wanders into The Blackfriar and, spotting a table, sits down. The mother begins to peruse the laminated menu. The children chat amiably. The mother puts the menu down and discusses its contents with the father. Time passes. The father looks at the menu. He discusses its contents with the mother. More time passes. Eventually, the father decides to go to the bar. It’s been ten minutes. I wonder what it is about French visitors to our glorious capital that makes them skip the bit about ‘how pubs work’ in their guidebooks? Maybe French guidebooks just don’t have that section; possibly this crucial info is completely absent from l’internet. Perhaps they’ve been left (understandably) confused by the profusion of restaurants masquerading as pubs in London, where table service has become the semi-norm.

I suppose I have been in a similar situation. After all these decades, table service is a familiar holdover here that carries echoes of the temperance cause and regulartory community control. Well, a minor version of that I suppose, at least compared to Iceland as Will Howard reports:

In 1908, the Icelandic government put the decision to vote, asking the public whether they wanted to outlaw alcohol in their country. After 60% of the voting populace said yes, the prohibition was put into effect in 1915. However, they reassessed in a matter of years. Wine was put back on the menu in 1922. Spirits came along a little later in 1935, but beer remained strictly forbidden for nearly the entire rest of the century. This was partially due to puritanical, classist logic about the effect that cheap beer has on the underclass, but there was also another, more important reason that beer was outlawed for so long – up until 1944, Iceland was an associated territory of Denmark, which was a cute way of saying that Iceland was under Danish rule, and the Danes loved their beer even more than the rest of mainland Europe did, thus, drinking beer was seen as coloniser behaviour.

Well, now you know. A Good Colonizer’s Beer Blog is my new title. Or rather Bjórblogg góðs landnema if you know what I mean. And I know you know. It’s what brings us all together once a week, right? Right?? As we await your reponses on that point, please check out Boak and Bailey who are posting every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “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, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November 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. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. See you next week!

*Sunny and plus 15C by late afternoon Wednesday. Even put a daub of sunscreen on. Why were you complaining so much? Me? I wasn’t complaining. You were!
**Notice also both records reference Red Streak as a 1600s apple variety for fine cider.

Your Alluring Beery News Notes For The Magical Week When The Cowbirds Returned…

We all know that the swallows Capistrano in California and it’s all yada yada yada, right? But here – the Cowbirds are back. Yes! See… I have an app on the phone that identifies birdcalls and sitting in the parking lot of a municipal park the other day it clearly picked up the squeek of Brown-headed Cowbirds, the parasitical arseholes of the birding world. Isn’t nature wonderful! Well, it is inside. The cukes and tomatoes still face a few light frosts keeping them indoors. That middle plant? Tumeric. Just stick a chunk of rhizome in a peat pot and keep the soil damp. Easy. Peasy.

What else is going on? First up, hot news out of Iowa this week and Ms. M. Ogle may have let a cat out of a bag over at BlueSky:

This is so sweet! @dsquareddigest.bsky.social defends Budweiser in part by relying on my book. (The essay is from 2007.) PS: I’m currently working on a 20th anniversary edition w new material. Release late summer.

Fine, that does seem a bit intentional. So save up your pennies for that wee treat later this year. The Tand himself likes a similar sort of straight forward discussion as he wrote about this week:

Way back in the past I wrote about how the modern mannerism “You all right there” at the bar had become a kind of of substitute for previous greetings such as “what can I get you?” or “what would you like?” For the record, it was a short blogpost, as this one will be, and it was over fifteen years ago and, inevitably, in the way of things, it has got worse. Fifteen years ago, I was by my measure of the day an old git – and I quote myself there. Nowadays I’m an even older old git and while generally good natured, I am slightly wound up, inwardly at least by how bar staff have become even more slapdash.

Perhaps this is what distinguishes a UK pub from the sort of port town tavern I was raised in. I would not necessarily want to engage with the guy on the other side of the bar as, when I did, his side of the conversation could be more like “you call that a tip?” or “I got kids, you know…” Speaking of which, it seems pretty obvious to me, if IKEA can sell discount meatballs to those waiting for the shopping for even more napkins and sidetables to be over, that a discount grocery store should be able to make a little something on the side by selling macro lager in a somewhat unattractive setting to those silently waiting for the groceries to be gathered:

German discount grocery chain Lidl has begun building its first ever pub, which is expected to open this summer. The pub and its associated liquor store, located in Northern Ireland, will offer Lidl’s range of wines, beers, ciders, spirits and liqueurs, according to the retailer. The premises will be located in the eastern Belfast suburb of Dundonald, next to one of Lidl’s existing stores, it said in a statement. The pub will be able to seat 60 people and will have a floor space of 60 squar meters (646 square feet).

As John Milton told us centuries ago, they are also served who would otherwise only stand and wait. Not waiting around at all is Katie M. who has justifiably strong feelings about the quality of news coverage of pub life in the UK, as she unpacked this week:

Pubs and beer will never receive the coverage they deserve in the national press because they are seen as lesser, until they elevate themselves to the point of being better than a mere public house. I agree with Sitwell that the Laddie is superlative, “a quite magnificent thrill” but I also note that he mentions one drink throughout the entire review, a pint of Guinness, despite the location being a pub and not a restaurant. Oh, I am so sick of Guinness getting all the headlines (sorry Padraig, it’s nothing personal.) The whisky selection! The wine list! The cask on offer at this place! It’s all carefully chosen by experts in their field with purpose and delight. It deserves at least a casual reference. I love pubs. Millions of British and Irish people love pubs. So why are we still being offered so little in terms of pub and beer coverage?

On perhaps a related note, I realized I had noticed something that I should have noticed before. When describing folk writing about beer and pubs, news media tend to describe them as “our beer expert“* while every other columnist on restaurants, theatre, music etc is the newspaper’s “critic.” Why is that and what does it suggest? Do they lack a certain edge that one sees, for example, in Boak and Bailey‘s honest and detailed weekly reviews? Would a news paper ever publish the words “somewhat muddy in appearance and flavour, like one of our own attempts at home brewing“? And when a paper clearly seems to have at least two, they never acknowledge the other one. Always “our beer expert” in the singular. Hmm…

The Irish Times has raised an issue about non-alcohol beers that is not discussed. We have heard and accept that the cost of production is no less than traditional brewing but what is not discussed is now it is often not taxed in the same way:

…walk up to a bar in Ireland and order an excise-free, non-alcoholic beer and you’ll pay close to the same as you would for the full-strength equivalent. This has been a bugbear for consumers for years. Three years ago, in a written Dáil answer, the then minister for finance, Michael McGrath, said pricing of these drinks was a matter for retailers and publicans. “This should reflect the fact that no excise applies to such products as well as other factors,” he said. A pint of standard beer comes with a 54 cent excise rate attached – its zero-alcohol partner does not… “The challenge with non-alcoholic beers is that there’s not much transparency here. A lot of this is very opaque and the private business of manufacturers.”

I have become a regular purchaser of NA Guinness but, thinking about it, I have no idea what role taxation plays in the final price. Speaking of things I never knew nuttin’ about, this very week Mr. R. Protz has opened my eyes to an even more troubling aspect of the beer related media:

While breweries & publicans struggle in a tough climate, trad beer writers work hard for lean pickings, a most lucrative “career in beer” is viral boozing. Jon May boasts “the best job in the world” earns £100k a year livestreaming drinking 10 pints a day. Downside: his health concerns.

Downside #2: taking advice from a drunk moron. Upside: won’t last that long. Lars may well have provided a hint as to the perfect soundtrack for these sorts of things.

Jeff gave us a summary of the Brewers Association stats for 2025 and it appears things ended up worse than expected:

Total craft production fell 5.1%, accelerating the decline last year of 3.9%.Overall beer sales declined slightly more, at 5.7%, allowing the craft segment to tick up to 13.3% of the total beer market. That’s way worse than the overall beer market did last year, when it declined only 1.2%. In terms of dollars, craft constitutes a quarter of the dollars earned on beer, unchanged from last year. The overall number of American breweries fell by 218 in the past year to 9,578 according to the Brewers Association (but please note that that figure is almost certainly overstated.)

Even with some pretty sad number twisting attempts, that’s a combined drop in production of over 9% for 2024-25. And 2024 was not the beginning as (we recall from a footnote) craft production at that point had already “declined for the 3d year in a row and 4th year outta 5…” Didn’t expect an accelleration in the decline. But, again, has BMI seen the bottom? Still… if there is a change coming, could it include a division between efficient and hand made beers? I saw a glimmer of this when Knut interviewed Nikklas, the brewer of Sweden’s Hops ‘n Leon who shared a thought that might lean towards a future schism in the making:

…we prefer bottles for our beer. I feel it also sends a message that this is craft. I feel that cans symbolize something more industrial.

A revival of small scale traditional brewing might be interesting. Remember the good old days, I say. Well, the big news out of the March 8 1917 edititon of the Cape Vincent Eagle was the bootleggers. We discussed bootlegging last week but this bourbon-less era during tariff time has me on the look out for The Ontario Temperance Act of 1916 remained in force until 1927 whereas US Prohibition was the law across the river from 1920 to 1933. The ban on both sides of the border only lasted for seven years. Not that there wasn’t booze moving even during those days. One must always remember the testimony of Mr. Aikens , the man with “a host of friends” according to the Royal Customs Commission of 1927. But it is not all old news. A form of prohibition still exists as Drew in Boston noticed this week. Yup, bars at the Red Sox’s home of Fenway Park came under scruity for serving minors (aka young adults in an unfree state):

The state Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission has ordered Game On Sports Cafe, 72-82 Lansdowne St., to give up its liquor license for five days starting April 20 and Fenway Johnnie’s, 96-98 Brookline Ave., to give up its license for four days starting April 27, after inspectors found both serving underage drinkers with fake IDs. But Fenway Johnnie’s shut for good earlier this month, so, oh, well. The Game On suspension stems from a visit around 10:30 p.m. on Oct. 4, 2024 by state inspectors – who found 17 people under 21 with drinks, from Coors Lite and Michelob Ultra to various vodka and whiskey-based concoctions.

Imagine being twenty years old and legally barred from drinking a Michelob Ultra! Time for notes!

Note #1: Ramble On.
Note #2: “Had any bourbon lately?’
Note #3: Katie M. on the pubs and breweries of Cumbria.
Note #4: ATJ on travel and beer.

I miss Bourbon. Have I ever mentioned that? What else might I be missing? Ruvani’s piece about ranch water was published this week in Austin Monthly. Ranch water? She explains the drink’s background:

Founded by late local restaurateur Kevin Williamson in 1998, his original Ranch Water recipe hit the menu in February 1999, based on a concoction Williamson invented on hunting trips with his father, mixing tequila and lime in his water bottle topped off with crisp chilled Topo Chico. Williamson correctly surmised that his own refreshing treat would slake the thirst of other parched Texans and worked up his original recipe with two parts reposado tequila, one part orange liqueur (Ranch 616 uses Sauza Hornitos and Jalisco 1562, respectively), and one part lime, served over ice with a freshly popped frosty Topo Chico on the side to be poured to taste.

Not to be confused with Topo Gigio, Topo Chico is a mineral water from Mexico.

Finally, in their newletter to subscribers, Pellicle has announced some plans and asked for additional support:

Last month the team gathered in London to begin looking at the bigger picture, and discussed everything from the look and feel of the website (you might have noticed a little update to the homepage), the results of the survey you all kindly completed and how best to implement those findings, and—most importantly of all—to start making serious plans to launch issue one of our print publication…. You may also have seen we’ve recently ramped up our subscription drive, which is an important part of this. Growing our subscriber numbers remains the most sustainable way to grow the resources we have at our disposal. More subscribers doesn’t just mean a print magazine. It means better rates for our contributors, proper support for our team as their workload increases, and potentially even the chance to invest in some of the kinds of content you indicated you might like to see in our survey: guides, short form writing, op-eds, personal essays, and travel stories. Our aim is to hit 1000 subscribers this year, which would mean growing our current number by around a third.

I cut and paste that much of a snipet out as I am myself a supporter. I root for them. Even as I have yet to figure out if Pellicle is a survivor or the conqueror in the beer publication field. The business model is prudent and realistic. The content is varied and often excellent. There’s good reason it gets so many links in these weekly round ups. And it still aspires to be more. Sign up. While I myself am at a heigher tier, their entry level subscription is just $2.50 a month via Paypal.

And that is it for now. As I adjust to the life of the idle and alive of a certain age, I will keep plugging away at these updates as best I can. For more, please check out Boak and Bailey who are posting every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “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, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November 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. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. See you next week!

*By contrast and fine example, Laura is The Telegraph’s “regular correspondent” which seems much more satisfactory.

Your Scattered Beery News Notes For The Lunar The Low The Looney And Perhaps Even The Ludicrous

Happy lunar loop de loop week. It’s hard to find a glimmer of good in an ugly world but the Artemis II mission into outer space did its best to try. As has the prospects of the Two-Tailed Dog Party in this weekend’s elections in Hungary. Coming in at a solid 3.27% of the vote last time around, their past platform gives a bit of hope:

The party platform promised eternal life, world peace, a one-day workweek, two sunsets a day (in assorted colours), lower gravity, free beer, and low taxes. Other electoral pledges have included building a mountain on the Great Hungarian Plain.

Will the space craft land? Will greater freedom return to Hungary? Will the ceasefire hold? These are the questions for the week to come. Until then, some beer news. First up, Lars announced the publication of a study of farmhouse yeasts of northern Europe, the culmination of years of work and a number of challenges:

The paper was done by the Verstrepen lab at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology, the same place that did the famous paper giving us the first view of the family tree for brewer’s yeast. Work on the paper started in September 2017, when I mailed off the first batch of yeast cultures to Leuven. It had gotten quite far when covid caused Belgium to shut down so hard that everyone must work from home, and obviously you can’t do lab work at home. By the time restrictions had lifted several people had moved on to other jobs, and the paper sat languishing until Peter Bircham decided to pick it up again. He and I worked on it for a while, until Peter moved to New Zealand. Eventually, once he was settled there, a Gang of Four got it moving once more, and last year we finally submitted it.

This is very important stuff and a worthy outcome for all his years of effort. The study describes seven cultures or zones rather than strains as these “cultures have been reused by farmhouse brewers for at least centuries, quite possibly millennia, so they consist of lots of different strains.” The, as illusrated by the map under that thumbnail, the study describes how each culture relates within its zone. Super neato. Lars has also been out skiiing in shorts, too.

Staying in Scandenavia, Knut has shared a profile of a pub in Sweden. Ruckel Beer Bar, where he spent part of Good Friday productively:

Ruckel means shack or hovel in English, a description or the building they took over when they were starting the brewery. I doubt the premises they have moved into with their new pub fit the ruckel description, but they have certainly put in many hours to make an inviting pub, split into various zones for eating, drinking and hanging out.

“Ruckle“ is a new and quite attractive word, at least for me. Not surprisingly, with an old Scandenavian connection, too. I have, on the other hand, heard of other old things like the Cooper’s Hill cheese roll as well as Royal Shrovetide Football but never before did I hear of the Hallaton Bottle Kicking each Easter:

…[a] brutal competition between rivals trying to wrestle barrels over a mile-long stretch of countryside. Hallaton Bottle Kicking is an ancient tradition, held each Easter Monday, in the village of Hallaton and neighbouring Medbourne… One “bottle”, which is a wooden cask much better suited to the rigours of the scrum than any glass item would be, is then decorated in red and white then paraded to the top of the village where the contest between Hallaton and Medbourne begins. The game is a best of three, with two “bottles” containing beer and the third completely wooden decorated bottle – which is referred to as the dummy. The outdoor sport is played across about a mile of open land and the two teams attempt to move the bottles over to the opposing team’s parish at each end of the area.

As noted in the B+B Patreon notes from last weekend, Eoghan alerted us to the closing of De Kulminator in Antwerp, a famous yet quirky beer bar with a vast selection of old bottles that created an odd test question that must be answered to qualify for entry:

Apparently they asked you what you wanted to do there – if you said drink a beer, no entry. If you said “enjoy a beer”, open sesame. But as I said, I never ran the gauntlet

One newspaper declared (testing your Dutch, not mine) “Het beste biercafé ter wereld is niet meer.” I think you can get the drift. Yet one Mr. W. Hawkes asked “What will they do with all that manky old beer?” Boak and Bailey visited in happier days in 2010, paying the price accordingly, as did The Beer Nut in 2017. Relatedly perhaps, Eric Asimov in The New York Times shared his observations on the shift in the sweet price point for best value in wine:

Good wines can come from anywhere and anybody. The value is in identifying these little-known producers and regions before they are more widely discovered, and prices go up. That requires a fair amount of trial and error and taking chances on the unknown. How long will $15 to $20 remain the sweet spot for these sorts of wine values? It’s a lot harder to find them today. While I will continue to take on this particular challenge, it’s fairer to say $20 to $30 today is what $15 to $20 used to be. But that conversation is restricted to the least expensive value rung… That underscores a key rule of value hunting: The greater the splurge, regardless of the price, the less inclined you are to explore and the more you want a sure thing.

Do we talk of value with good beer in a similar way? Does manky old ale have value? Perhaps a few do but through the arc of the rise and fall craft beer over the last twenty years, the wider market never really established the sort of constructs that provide some confidence in relative value that we see with wine. Too often commentators seem content go back to the same shallows that may have helped set up good beer for its cultural nosedive in the first place. Even as so many beers were presented and consumed as near clones of each other in an oligopolistic manner, little attention was given to advising consumers about which beer could be swapped out for what at, say 50% or 80% of the cost. Could that change now that the kid (if not boxing) gloves are off? As you think on that, here are some notes:

Note #1: Perhaps don’t cheat on your forensic expert wife.
Note #2: “Broken toilet, no showers and farts“… yet not a pub.
Note #3: “Trends continue to oscillate week-to-week…“

And… we are back. Following up on that last note, discussions in investment circles are indicating… or at least suggesting… or maybe only postulating that the price of shares in brewing corporations may have hit bottom and are (…potentially…) ready to rise:

The central question is whether shipments will finally catch up to depletions. Analysts note that consumption trends accelerated throughout the December-February period and continued improving in March, but shipment data through February hasn’t yet reflected this strength. Multiple Wall Street firms cite distributor feedback indicating momentum has returned, particularly in scanner data showing March beer volumes up 6.5%.

At that point in the marketplace, the trends are most relevant for macro brewing. Will you invest? For What’s Brewing, Laura Hadland shared an experience at Heineken where the mega brewery approaches the task at hand from an unexpected angle:

I was baffled as to why the tour guide was giving us the in-depth view on its malt and the hallowed Heineken-A yeast, but nobody was talking about hops. At all. I even asked the question explicitly: what hops do you use? The tour guide didn’t know. Neither did the colleague that she ran off to ask. It was only when I (luckily) found myself in the company of global master brewer Willem Van Waeberghe, that I discovered the answer. The answer was, it doesn’t matter. In the Netherlands, Heineken sources hops from the US, but its licensed brewers around the world can source whatever they want. All the hops are added at the start of the boil for bitterness only. They never have a second hop addition. All of Heineken’s flavour, which is perhaps a little fruity, a touch herbaceous with just the tiniest note of aniseed, comes from the yeast esters.

Conversely perhaps, as reported by Kendall Jones, tiny Big Block Brewing in Washington State has found new flavours in old hops:

“We got a bunch of ladders and laid them down over the blackberries and used them to get into the hops,” says Julum. “A lot of cuts and scrapes later, we had enough hops to make a batch of beer. The problem was that Sammamish State Park was in the process of removing all of the invasive species from the land, and hops are an invasive species, so we needed to do more than pick the hop flowers. We had to dig up the rhizomes so we could replant them”… Likely, Ezra Meeker was the source of the original rhizomes, as he was for so many farmers in the area at that time. Meeker primarily cultivated English Cluster hops. The Monohon hops are very likely a descendant of that variety.

Well, likely by the time those hop rhizomes hit the continent’s Pacific side, Cluster-esque might be the better way of putting it. And Colbier Brew Co., a “Bootle-based brewery” is the subject of this week’s feature in Pellicle. “Bootle” is also another old word for a dwelling which may well be a cut above a “ruckle” but none of that is part of the story as told by Rebecca Crowe who first encounters a beer by Colbier named Falsetto:

As a lover of the darkest pint of cask beer available, the ideal of white stout is like a unicorn to me, and I must find it. Eventually, I receive a message from the team at Doctor Duncan’s, a pub on Queen’s Square near Lime Street station, who tell me it’s in their cellar and that it’ll be on soon. When I finally get a pint of Falsetto in front of me, I’m entranced by its bitter, chocolate notes. Close your eyes, and you’d swear you were drinking a dark beer, albeit not as unctuous and creamy-tasting as Colbier’s oatmeal stout, Nocturne. However, the bitterness and innovative nature of a white stout is the perfect signifier of what this Bootle-based brewery likes to do.

White stout, eh? Something like myself, I suppose. Enough of that. Next, a tale of crime at the government liquor store back home in Nova Scotia:

In 21 years of policing, RCMP Sgt. Serge Landry says he’d never seen anything like what was seized from a home in Dartmouth, N.S., just before last Christmas. After a two-month investigation into significant alcohol thefts from NSLC stores in the Halifax region, officers seized more than 450 bottles of hard alcohol worth almost $20,000 from a home on Floral Avenue. Police even seized a ledger detailing the alcohol being delivered to the home and what had been resold. “I’ve never seen it to this scale,” said Landry.

Not just alcohol. Hard alcohol. Always been this way. As a lad, I remember a summer job painting a house next to the one run by the bootlegger. Steady traffic on a Sunday afternoon, back when the government store was shut. And there was the other job at the senior’s house when one resident born before the First World War ratted out another of a similar age for running the ice delivery warehouse which contained a bootlegging operation out of the middle of the warehouse, amongst the walls of neatly stacked ice blocks.

Finally, following up on last week’s story on the effect of Gulf War III on the cost of beer packaging in India, NPR is reporting this week on another pressure that might arise as global aluminum supplies have also been affected:

Aluminum prices recently hit a four-year high, after Iran struck two large smelters of the metal in the Middle East. Both of them were major suppliers to the United States. Aluminum, which is on the list of 60 minerals deemed critical by the U.S. government, is widely used for beer and soda cans, in cars and packaging.

Well, that is it for now. Crisis and crime yet exploration, each in its way human-kind caused. And another possible positive week for the beer trade. Beer likes peace. As we wait for the results, please check out Boak and Bailey who are posting every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “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, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November 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. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. See you next week!

And, Just Like That, We Are In Q2 2026… Can August Be Far Behind?

Springtime. That’s what this is supposed to be right now. Yes, my Red Sox are out there choking as the season begins and, yes, my Leafs are out there choking as the season winds down. So the calendar looks like it’s on the right page for sure. But… where is that first sweater and shorts day I have been looking forward to? When will I be able to rake the lawn. Raking the lawn is an important old guy task. It leads to people leaving you alone, unsure why the lawn needs raking. You tell them “breaks up the thatch!” but they don’t know that’s just code. Code for there’s a couple of beer tucked away in the shed. Ah… the shed. See you soon!

Meanwhile, in Pellicle last Friday, David Bailey‘s* cartoon featured the various postures seen at the pub bar. Is it ageist to say the one that struck me as most accurate was the one to the right? As a newly minted retired guy I can say these sorts of things. Isn’t that how it works? Like raking the lawn. Because you need to break up that thatch, right?

Next up, Katie wrote about one of my favourite cities due as much to the depot for bus route 128 to the villages of the fam as anything. But, Ms. M. does know a good spot when she sees one and this week we read about her thoughts at the sight of Kay’s Bar:

Once a wine and spirits shop in a nefarious part of town where the streets ran toxic with sewage and the tenements were cramped and filthy, Kay’s Bar is now uncommonly beautiful. Like most cobbled and higgledy-piggledy neighbourhoods in the UK, Jamaica Street has a “dirty past” as local pub writer Imran Rahman-Jones puts it, but now it feels pleasantly historic, and the low stone buildings around us are picturesque. When our group comes upon the pub in the early hours of dusk, the side doorway glowing golden in the darkening blue.

As the son of a son of MacKenzie Street by Cappielow in Greenock, I recognize the lineage.

Beer writers talk lots about being judges but not a lot about being amongst the judged, the position which carries a lot more weight to my mind. But this week Alistair wrote about entering and receiving the results of three beers he entered into competition:

There is a large amount of irony, given what I just said about crystal malt, in the fact that this used 5 types of crystal malt, 15, 40, 60, 120, and 260, as well as dose of chocolate wheat. Hence I named this Crystal Conjunction. It’s kind if hilarious then that one judge commented that the “absence of balancing caramels and light roast/chocolate impact the overall character”. Literally all the specialty malts were crystal or chocolate malts. Obviously mild is not something that is wildly common, heck it might as well as an endangered species over here, but I have come across a concept many times in the US that a mild is basically an uber session stout – which is simply not true, the range of possibility within mild makes it a beer you can take in so many directions, as borne out by the BJCP guidelines themselves.

And Jeff was on the otherside of the glass, having judged at the Oregon Beer Awards with this interesting comments on process:

In judging these beers, you do take style into account, along with the brewery’s submitted notes on the beer. If you have a beer that just lists a style, you judge it both as an example of that style and how well it competes against the other beers at the table. If the brewery has added a note, you include that in your calculation. A beer might be dinged for being a poor example of its style but elevated for being just an awesome beer or vice versa. If the brewery says it has hibiscus or rye malt or is “American-style,” we would expect it to taste like rye, hibiscus, or elevated hops. You take all of that into account.

Speaking of the limits of the aphorism “judge not lest ye be judged” we are advised that this is not an April Fool’s Day spoof:

Tilray Brands is partnering with the Magnum Ice Cream Company to launch Popsicle Hard, a ready-to-drink cocktail inspired by the frozen treat brand’s classic flavors. The noncarbonated beverages are beginning to roll out nationwide in 12-can variety packs. Popsicle Hard has a 5% alcohol-by-volume rate and is available in cherry, orange and grape flavors. Tilray is producing the drinks through a licensing agreement with Magnum Ice Cream, which was spun out from Unilever at the end of last year.

Ah, fads… or was that a spoof! Perhaps with about 97.38% more integrity, this week Boak and Bailey investigated the resurgence of Bass on cask in English pubs this week and found hope in the new enthusiasm:

What makes us think that it might, on balance, be good news is that it’s good to see people – and especially younger drinkers – expressing enthusiasm for cask ale. The Bristol Flyer on Gloucester Road in Bristol is one of those perfectly fine vaguely gastro, vaguely loungey pubs. The quality of the beer has been up and down over the years but recently it’s been serving excellent Bass. Jess often ends up there for one social event or another and on a recent visit was amazed when the hip young barperson said, with full emotion, “Oh, great choice, I love Bass, I drink it all the time! And it’s been flying out since we started selling it.” At The Crown we’ve similarly seen groups of hipsterish young men ordering rounds of Bass, getting their Bass club cards stamped, and generally embracing their identity as Bass Guys.

Bass Masters would be my choice of terms… had others not moved in on the opportunity. And if you asked how big Guinness is in the US these days… would this be the sort of response you’d have expected, as reported by BMI?

Import lagers are nearly 97% of all imported beer in US scans, per NIQ xAOC + Liquor + Conv data for 52 wks thru Mar 7, Bump Williams Consulting’s Dan Wandel found in latest data deep dive, following up on his past analysis of American lagers. Guinness stouts and Belgian ales make up most of the rest, growing nicely these days.

I wonder if 2026 Guinness regrets the Baltimore closure in 2023. As you ponder that, here are some notes:

Note #1: do you have a third condiment?
Note #2: is using the word “founder’ just cringy or worse?
Note #3: don’t forget to have fun.
Note #4: are you still hunting the next great beer?

Are you back? Good. Franz D. Hofer has been attracting attention with his wanderings out and about and then his writings all about it at A Tempest in a Tankard – but now he has joined the collective with his first piece at Pellicle, a study of things Zoiglly… Zoiglich?… Zoigl-riffic!

Tucked away in the dense woodland of northeastern Bavaria, the Oberpfalz is the cradle of Zoigl culture. Zoigl is more than a kind of beer. It’s an ethos, a resolute defence of a slower way of life in the face of our contemporary desire for on-demand pleasures. Zoigl begins life in the communal brewhouse, a holdover from the late Middle Ages. More than seventy towns in the Oberpfalz presided over communal brewhouses in the 19th century. Today, only five remain: Windischeschenbach, Neuhaus, Falkenberg, Mitterteich, and Eslarn. Residents in possession of historical brewing rights take turns from week to week brewing beer that they’ll ferment in their cellars and serve for a few days every month in their Zoiglstuben. You’ll know the beer’s ready when they hang a six-pointed Zoigl star from the façade.

Carry on with the medieval history, according to The Times and some eggheads, turns out that Pinot Noir is effectively a clone of itself going back to the 1400s:

Scientific proof has now been found that pinot noir grapes, used to make red Burgundies in France, have survived unchanged at least since the Middle Ages. A 600-year-old grape seed found in the latrine of a medieval hospital in Valenciennes, northern France, has been identified as genetically identical to modern pinot noir through DNA analysis, according to a study… By taking cuttings rather than growing from seed, winemakers can produce a new plant that is genetically identical to the mother vine. For the study, the researchers sequenced the genomes of 54 grape seeds dating from about 2,000 BC to the Middle Ages. The oldest seeds were from wild vines in southern France. Domesticated vines appeared in the region much later, between 625 and 500 BC, when Greek colonists introduced viticulture in France.

On a more serious and immediate note, if you want an easy measurement of the effect of the third Gulf War in my adulthood, Jessica Mason for DB has surveyed the consequences on India’s beer trade:

In a recent report via Reuters, the Brewers Association of India openly revealed that glass bottle prices have risen by around 20%. Added to this, packaging such as beer cartons have doubled while labels and tape have also become price affected. Gas shortages are now also forcing a raft of glass bottle makers to slow or stop their operations. Plus, aluminium can suppliers are also signalling that there will possibly be imminent reductions in the lead up to summer… “Beer businesses are particularly vulnerable when oil and gas prices rise because the impact is felt at several different points in the chain,” Molly Monks, insolvency expert at Parker Walsh, recently told db.

Hmm. You know… I have this creeping feeling that we are at March 5, 2020 unaware of the full impact of what is about to hit. With that cheery note, finally, as heavily hinted, I have joined the idle undead. I hope to be not quite as idle long term but these days my pj bottoms are finding new life in the am to pm zone. Can’t rake lawn thatch every day. So…. what to do… while way the hours pressing the fish doorbell? Or instead of that maybe this, drawn from an anecdote about Japanese writer Haruki Murakami:

…long before he became a famous writer, he ran a jazz café in Tokyo, called Peter Cat. People would come in, quietly drink an espresso or sip a single malt and listen to Miles Davis and Charles Mingus LPs on a great sound system. If anyone talked too loudly, or maybe at all, the other customers shot disapproving glares. The point wasn’t to yak or troll for a companion; it was to just sit there and listen attentively without distraction. Bars like that, known as jazz kissa, were popular back in the 1970s when Peter Cat was at the height of its fame. Now, according to National Geographic, they’re spreading to cities around the world…

I like the sound of that sorta place… but what about this place? As part of my inward thoughts, I reached out to B+B on what I might do with this space and these blistered bloody digits of mine. They shared a number of ideas via email and these two particularly struck me:

We also remembered the work you were doing around pre-1800 beer styles and brewing, which does feel overlooked. All those Derby Ales and Pimlico Ales and Dorchester Ales and the like. There’s such a strong pull towards writing about Victorians and later that this period — with sources that are harder to find an interpret — feels overlooked. We also tend to pounce on any work anyone does with meaningful analysis of data and stats. So much beer writing is about feelings and experience but numbers often reveal deep truths.

Both have the common theme of avoiding the easier path. My challenge with the first (like the 1600s Lambeth Ale or 1700s Dorchester posts) is it feels like the rise of the internet oligarchs has made easy (and free) access to reasonable organized data bases more difficult than ten years ago. I will have to investigate. The second? It’s the math. I always thought that when I was aggregating any sort of numbers and seeing what I could squeeze out of them, well, my grade 12 math teacher was standing nearby reminding me of my couragous 53 as a final exam mark. So whenever I ran some sort of beery data or another through Excel sheets I usually received “ERROR! ERROR!! ERROR!!!” responses. So… any requests? Perhaps “Shut ‘er down, Al!”? or “Take up knitting, you fool!!!” Who knows. Comments greatly appreciated.

Well, that was that. The week that was. A bit of a hard week on the nerves. Until the day I got to sleep in. That was good. We see how the next week goes. In the meantime, please check out Boak and Bailey who are posting every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “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, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November 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. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. See you next week!

*No relation.