Category: Beer in the End Times

Your Middle Of January 2021 Beery News Notes For A Thursday

And what a Thursday! The last of Donald Trump’s pre-incarceration period!!!  Days to go… unless he drops the big one and we all fry. That would be typical, wouldn’t it. As soon as you think you are getting rid of a fifth-rate loser like Donnie T, he drops the big one and we all fry. I shall miss things. As in all things, sure, but in particular the sort of unsmarmy positive stuff that slips through all the smarmy positive stuff about good beer, like that image above from The Wicking Man as well as his accompanying message:

I’m sure many have had difficult times in lockdown and like me have been lifted by good people on Twitter. Many thanks to my #pubtwitter friends. Your tweets and blogs have made me smile and I look forward to the days when we can share our pub trips again.

The Tand wrote a bummer of a post about the perils Welsh icon Brains Brewery faces in these uncertain times:

So what has happened? In short, Covid-19 has happened. Wales has been particularly hard hit by restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic causing “significant financial pressure” to Brains. The company had already concentrated business on a core number of  around 160 pubs with the remaining 40 or so being closed or sold off in March 2020.  Clearly this wasn’t enough to stave off problems, as this was followed by an announcement before Christmas that rival pub chain Marston’s was to take over on 25-year lease, 156 Brains pubs in a bid to save 1,300 jobs.  The deal includes a supply agreement to continue the availability of Brains brands in the pubs, which will be leased to Marston’s at an annual rent of £5.5 million. Brain’s managed houses will also be run by Marston’s.

And similarly Jeff wrote about the death of Portland Brewing Company, an early participant in that area’s scene, offering us basically an obituary written by an old friend:

On the Friday afternoon of January 8th, Portland Brewing put out a short note announcing that, after a 35-year run, they were winding down all operations. It was a strangely subdued note given the brewery’s historical significance. One of the founding quartet of Portland breweries that started putting out beer between late 1984 and 1986, it played a substantial role in laying the foundation that would place beer at the center of the city’s identity by the early 1990s.

Going back further, Jeremy Irons as Wooster advertising a sherry of a sort in the 1970s. Fabulous.

Canadian author Anne Theriault spotted an important moment in 18th century English brewing culture the other day:

Because I am twelve years old, I wish to read more about the 18th century Farting Club in Cripplegate, where members “meet once a Week to poyson the Neighbourhood, and with their Noisy Crepitations attempt to outfart one another.” Truly the past is a foreign etc… 

Careful readers will recall that Cripplegate was one of the great brewing areas of London for hundreds of years.  Theriault linked to her source, Geri Walton, who had shared further detail including this:

To determine a winner, stewards acted as judges and new stewards were chosen quarterly. The stewards also resolved any disputes that arose “between the Buttocks of the odoriferous Assembly.”[7] Furthermore, to ensure the competitors did not cheat, in a nearby room a bespectacled Alms-woman sat. This elderly woman’s job was to check the underwear of participants: If “any member was suspected of Brewers Miscarriage, he was presently sent in to be examined by the Matron, who after searching his Breeches, and narrowly inspecting the hind Lappet of his Shirt … made her Report accordingly.”[8]

The fact that there were 21 footnotes below the story is in itself wonderful.

Along the same lines and following up on their 2011 false claim of inventing the beer photo contest, US brewery Founders found time to commit a form of hari kari this past week. Perhaps it was the photoshopped image of their flag as the Battle of Congress last week but their lost their social media marbles by banning everyone on the planet who mentioned them – well, who mentioned their lack of interest in living in the 21st (and perhaps even the 2oth) century. It got so fun that folk like me baited them just to get blocked on Twitter but then all that happened was this:

Funny thing. That blocking strategy rolled out by Founders this weekend? Search for their Twitter handle as any prospective new customer might and you find this long list of folk very unhappy with you. Meaning @foundersbrewing decided to trash their brand

It’s true. This is how that works. Someone woke up and stopped all the blocking by Tuesday. Dumbasses.

Continuing from last week, Mark Solomon has posted again on his new blog, this time about his project Indigenous Brew Day:

I do worry about my alcohol consumption, I would be lying if I told you I don’t think often about addiction regularly.  I do believe I have a healthy relationship with alcohol but I am aware that can change quickly.  Although there are many Indigenous peoples who are struggling with addiction, there are many that have a healthy relationship with alcohol.  I want to tell that story, and turn around the misconceptions about Indigenous people and alcohol.  Indigenous Brew Day is a great start in changing misconceptions. 

ATJ wrote about missing pubs behind a paywall so I never got to read it.

The Beer Nut shared thoughts on one of his nation’s character flaws when it comes to good beer:

This beer deserves to sell in quantity but I fear that the mainstream stout drinkers are too set in their ways to switch, while the craft-curious have too much choice of other beers in more fashionable styles with arty labels to bother with this oulfellas’ stout which isn’t even in a can. The difficulty in getting Irish people to drink stouts is our beer scene’s principal national tragedy. And if you agree with me to any extent about that, make sure you get yourself some of this.

Further odd division was fomented by those who would control who should speak and what should be spoken when it comes to Dry January… oddly called Dry Feb here in Canada. “Keep it to yourself” v “if you’re doing Dry Jan and you’re sharing your experience keep it up” and see also this yet this but also this. I expect you can figure out where I sit on the question.

Kate Bernot has noted that the SCOTUS has declined to hear the case in Lebamoff v. Whitmer, a court case about widening interstate alcohol shipping laws. “Certiorari Denied!” is all they said. So no actual ruling with interesting chat to read unlike the similarly framed case before Canada’s top court in 2018.  SCOTUSblog has framed the issues in the case this way:

Whether a state liquor law that allows in-state retailers to ship wine directly to consumers, but prohibits out-of-state retailers from doing so, is invalid under the nondiscrimination principle of the commerce clause or is a valid exercise of the state’s 21st amendment authority to regulate the sale of alcoholic beverages within its borders.

And finally, in other semi-regulatory news, it appears the US Brewers Association may be facing challenging times, too, as they have announced a temporary free membership offer:

Not a member but want to join? To ensure no breweries are missing updates due to financial barriers, we’re offering nonmember breweries a temporary membership free of charge. Reach out to our membership team if you’re interested.

Jings. Well, that is that for now. Enjoy the reassertion of US democracy over the next week. As you do, for more good reading check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey, back now mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  We have a new entry from the DaftAboutCraft podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword.  And remember BeerEdge, too.

The Hogmanay Beery News Notes Special For Last Blursday 2020

Good riddance to 2020.  That’s it. No hum. No haw. It sucked and soon it’ll be over. Next year hopefully will suck less. But, still, at least three good beery things happened to me in this year of the plague which are worth noting:

i. In October, Boak and Bailey invited me to a Zoom chat that lasted a couple of hours.  We had a great old chat, from gossip to interesting thoughts on researching and writing brewing history.

ii. Since mid-March, we’ve been enjoying home delivery of beer mainly from Matron of nearby Bloomfield Ontario. We’ve likely had six or eight different beers from them and have gained a great sense of their liquid aesthetic through exercising a bit of focus. Forthright and Bobo are two standouts for me but Yeasayer has not left the house in ten months.

iii. Lars Marius Garshol published Historical Brewing Techniques, by far the best beer book of 2020. One of the few, sure, but the years of dedication to the pursuit of farmhouse brewing in Scandinavia and eastern Europe is one of the greatest bits of effort in the cause of good beer over the last decade.

There. That’s good. A bit slim. But pretty good. Well, for me. Where shall we start for you, the rest of human existence?  The pandemic? Sure. Fine. OK. In Maine, CJL herself has shone a light on some very poor behavior by one brewery while also illustrating how useful Twitter can be if you know how to use it:

Sunday River Brewing Company has been operating without masks and safety in the name of “freedom” and picking fights with the state to become martyrs for the industry, and raising funds alongside for “legal defense”… The restaurant/brewery has been cited MANY times now for non-compliance with mask orders. Undercover people from the state have documented lack of mask wearing over months, so the state recently said, “hey, your license is set to renew in December… and we’re not renewing it.”

Elsewhere? Summaries. First, across the Atlantic, I Might Have A Glass of Beer posted his Golden Pint 2020 awards from Glasgow, Scotland and shared many thoughts about how the great pivot sometimes made life with beer more interesting in 2020. And found a few more good things about the last year. Example:

A fascinating phenomenon was the redefinition of “beer garden” in 2020. As a partisan of Bavarian beer culture, I am often disappointed by what is offered under this name in the UK, with not a chestnut tree, a stoneware mug or a radish in sight. Yet this year the label became even looser, and over the summer it seemed that merely a row of white plastic chairs on the pavement outside a pub was enough to be a “beer garden”. Nonetheless even this was a definite improvement for some pubs and it’s to be hoped that this trend will continue after all this is over.

And The Beer Nut started on the pandemic fatigue fatigue with his own Golden Pints 2020 from non-northern Ireland which included this welcome remembrance in one category’s name:

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: @RuariOToole
It was very much the year for weird and grim humour, and Ruari’s Twitter provided plenty of it. Much appreciated, my man. Dudes rock!

See also Ben Viveur.  See also Quare Swally. See also New School Beer. See also Craft Beer Scribe. Et ceterah… et ceterah… but not Anthony Hopkins. He’s been dry since 1975. Who knew?

Another positive sign was reported by the Protz – with a keen eyed lawyer as key to the action:

….she hoped for a better life in 2016 when it sold the Roscoe to Hawthorn Leisure, the pub-owning division of New River Retail. It wasn’t to be. Hawthorn refused her MRO – Market Rent Only – in order to buy her own beers, on the grounds the company owned fewer than 500 pubs and was outside the terms of the Pubs Code. Carol’s lawyer found that Hawthorn, after buying a package of pubs from Marstons, owned more than 700 pubs and was covered by the code. Hawthorn responded by saying they would take the pub into management in 2021 when Carol’s lease expired. 

Hah! Contrarily, here in Ontario, Drunk Polkaroo* wrote about his five greatest disappointments in 2020… other than, you know, 2020 as a whole:

Drink tap water. Warm tap water. And you might get more out of it than shame and sadness. I drink ’em so you don’t have to…Molson Ultra is a 3.0% Light Lager and well, it is light on everything a beer should be. I’ve had light lagers, a lot of them in fact recently and this is not that. Not even that bubbly, leaves a dry, salt like chemical finish after hinting of hops and barley. Blah, but I had to know, didn’t I.

Writing from Washington, DC, the Beerbrarian summed up his year enjoying both music and beer. He noted:

In 2019 I kind of gave up on IPAs. I don’t really know why, it just shook out that way. Well, they’re back, including two stellar double IPAs, normally the bane of my existence. Go figure. Which style declined at IPAs’ expense? Saison. I saw significantly fewer cans of that style around, which is a bummer. From March 13th to the end of the year I had three draft beers. Three! On the plus side, everyone put everything in cans, because they had to. 

Three.  That’s more that none as one would find now in South Africa – and not supported by the SA Beer Association:

President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a televised address that cabinet had decided to move the country to level 3 restrictions from level 1. This would include the total banning of alcohol sales, widespread cancelling of events, and making the wearing of masks in public a legal requirement.

And Boak and Bailey gifted us an end of the year post on Toby Jugs:

What is a Toby jug? It’s a colourful pottery vessel, usually depicting a seated man in embroidered coat and tricorn hat holding a mug of beer and a pipe – decorative rather than useful. More than that, though – Toby jugs are a symbol, a marker, of a Proper Pub. Like other forms of greebling, they add depth, detail and hint at antiquity. They’re also a sort of summoning totem: this jovial, hollow-legged fellow is exactly the kind of customer we want.

Fabulous. We have a Winston Churchill Toby Jug somewhere, circa 1945.

Also ending the year, a couple of navel gazing conversations here and here. First, triggered by the death of that odd thing called October, there was plenty of points of view but this from Matt is the best of the lot:

It’s owners, Condé Naste, will, like all mainstream publishers no doubt avoid further investment in beer coverage in the same vein in the future. This is devastating. As a publisher of an independent beer-focused magazine, things are fucking tough. Readerships are small.

Well, a web-zine. Magazines are found in corner smoke shops and news stands. I know because I buy one at a place like that. It’s about telescopes. Readership definitely is small for beer writing and so being a web-zine is clever. As are patronage subscriptions with little but no return but the continuation of the ‘zine. Second and perhaps in awareness of the endy times for the unsupported beer periodical, this was posed:

Been thinking of @Ben_T_Johnson tweet encouraging peeps to blog more…. anyone interested in a blog about Indigenous home brewer trying to go pro lessons on the way comments about equity diversity and inclusion along the way…. Thoughts?

Many thoughts followed but the key to me was if you want substance, write it yourself. If you don’t want substance, just go all influencer and play with photos on Instagram. If you want money and audience, find another topic. Seriously. Few readers are into thinking about good beer. I could send you dozens of email addresses, addresses of those who had a dream of beer writing that failed. But if you want to enjoy writing about beer, just write about beer  – and yes an Indigenous home brewer could well be interesting new voice. With more new content. Not a lot of actual new content out there. Just write. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But just to saw that same log one more time – remember (as I shared in thread #1):

Beer writing is primarily for (1) fellow beer writers, then (2) industry folk then (3) a section of the beer drinking public with not only an interest in beer but interest in someone else’s thoughts. An oddly shaped marketplace of ideas without much symbiotic adjacency

Finally (and least of all) but not unrelated, an example (even if an ugly one), a bit of a non-story got tiny new legs when Harry Schuhmacher perhaps unwisely responded a week after the fact to that odd story in GBH** that looked much more like a hatchet job, a whack to the knees of a fellow struggling competitor than anything approaching actual news. What percentage pf America shares Harry’s (mainly incorrect) view? 30%? 40%? Yet – an interesting accusation that GBH played selective with the quotes. Never saw that coming. Ultimately, sad for all concerned. Unsavory. Reputation is all you have. Don’t waste it.***

Update!:**** Just as the publication October spirals into the black hole somewhat of its own making, Robin had her excellent defense of Twitter published:

Gripes aside, it’s important to remember that Beer Twitter has its uses. In Waite’s case, and in the case of many online subcultures, it can help elevate the voices of someone from a marginalized community even making them a role model within a typically homogenized culture dominated by straight white cis men. Or it could be a place where you can see the professionals of the beer industry shed their two-dimensional enthusiast veneer, bonding over non-beer things and finding comfort, kinship, and solidarity during a time when we need it most.  

The thoughts shared mirror much of my own even if I am not a professional of the beer industry. The value of throwing a half baked idea on the table to be beaten up or just being silly is not to be ignored. Great read.

There. Tonight 2020 will be gone. Viva 2021. Viva! Viva!!! And remember throughout 2021 that for more good reading check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword.  And remember BeerEdge, too. Go! Merry Christmas all you all. See you on New Year’s Eve.

*Sober Polkaroo.
**To go along with their odd story on Hong Kong with the strange effort to find a pro-aspect and the other one with the slightly cringy treatment of a business associate accused of racist behavior.
***The legal meaning of “waste” is meant – not just misspend but destroy.
****A mess punctuationally speaking, I admit.

Christmas Eve 2020’s Merry And Very Own Beery News Notes


1775tavern1

It’s gone a bit quiet, hasn’t it. Yes, yes… there’s lockdown after lockdown all around – but there’s also winter settling in and Yuletide, too. Watching the UK – French blockade news is disheartening but at least France 24 is reporting all the Scottish scallops now in Paris have been sold. So, while we can’t be like those folk above from 1775 – and while we can’t even be down the pub with Santa Sid – we can more quietly mark the season and the day as our beliefs guide us. Go make a snow angel or just watch the stars overheard if the clouds take a break. Or do whatever you want… MNSFW.  It’s too late anyway, December 23rd as I write this. Tibb’s Eve in Newfoundland. Too late to change what’s happening now. The arse is out of it. We have bought the gifts, loaded the larder, filled the buttery and started to drain the bottles. Not quite the new roaring ’20s yet still a welcome break from the lockdowns.

Lockdowns. Always the lockdowns. One report on the lockdown from the auslanders on the way out of the EU  comes from The Retired Man Named Martin who went out a shipping in Sheffield:

Well, there was no panic buying. Perhaps because Northerners are less reliant on brie than London, perhaps because Morrisons are better at stocking shelves than Waitrose, perhaps because there’s a choice of a dozen supermarkets within a mile radius.

No panic. Good. No one needs that. Similarly – but a word that beer nerds like to deny – one of the most important in brewing is also on the go. Consolidation.  As Cookie noted, it is interesting then to read news of CAMRA welcoming one particular deal:

The Campaign for Real Ale said: “While we still need to see the detail of this deal, at first glance it appears a positive move. We hope this means that Marston’s will continue to run the pubs as beloved locals, securing their future for the communities that use them and the people they employ.” Findlay pledged to continue with Brains beers and said its tenanted tied pubs would now be able to stock the ales made by the Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company as well.

1,300 jobs saved. Maybe. Prepare ye for the top trend of Q1-Q3 2021. Consolidations are coming just as they always have after bottom is hit. Speaking of saving the day, I had no idea that there was intra-Germanic regulation of beer branding:

The consumer protection agency from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) has now banned a beer called Colonia, produced by a Frankfurt brewery, from being sold in NRW, where Cologne is situated. The State Agency for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection (LANUV) said the Frankfurt beer’s name and label could lead consumers to think they were buying Kölsch… The word Colonia harks back to the Latin name of the Roman colony from which the city developed, Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium… The term “Kölsch” has a protected geographical indication (PGI) within the European Union, meaning that a beer can be sold under that name only if it is brewed within 50 kilometres (30 miles) of the city of Cologne.

The Beer Nut is not panicking either in this time of second or third wave – and gave a lesson to those unappointed and slightly sad mere beer experts who know not how to cram so much opinion, information and joy into just one paragraph:

Blackest of the black; shiny with a deep tan head, it looks like it promises a good time. The aroma is fairly mild, but gives you all the cocoa you could want from a porter. The flavour is where it really excels. Well, flavour and mouthfeel: the two are inextricably linked. Big and creamy, and a little chewy is how it rolls; cakey, gooey. On that texture rides dark chocolate and liquorice for two kinds of sweetshop bitterness: a rich coffee roast and then a fruity plum pudding thing at the end. It’s sumptuous, and one of those strong dark jobs that makes you wonder why breweries even bother with barrel ageing. More biggity-big no-gimmick porters please!

Speaking of excellence, Martyn noted one “ancient brewing” story that was 67% less full of lies – and utter lies – with only passing reference to Dog Fish Head and the Hymn to Ninkasi, both well trod recourses to the shortcutter, in favour of more interesting info:

The location suggests the Natufians—a hunter-gatherer group that lived along the eastern Mediterranean from 15,000 to 11,000 years ago—used beer in honoring the dead. The beer’s age—between 13,700 and 11,700 years old—is a surprise. The beverage is roughly as old as the oldest Natufian bread, from between 14,600 and 11,600 years ago, discovered at a nearby site in Jordan.

Also thinking historically-wise, Gary posted a double this week, both on the question of English Christmas ales. One about Hallett and Abbey’s version from 160 years ago and, then, the associations between the day and the beer:

The Belgians and northern French took in general to branding beer for Christmas especially after World War II. It was a progenitor to the current widespread practice by craft brewers to label beers for the Season. Anchor Brewery’s annual Christmas Ale was influential here. Its beer is spiced, a different formula each year, reflecting that part of the Christmas beer tradition. Christmas ale was never, in other words, a fixed style or type of beer. At best it might mean something special made available at Christmas. Sussex-based Harvey’s award-winning Christmas Ale, a barley wine (old Burton type), is an outstanding current example in the UK.

Never knew that. And speaking of things I had never heard of until just now, Stan released his latest Hop Queries monthly newsletter this week full of stats and non-stats sharing mucho including this about “dip hopping”:

So what do we know? Kirin began using the process in 2012 for its Grand Kirin beers. Basically, brewers there make a slurry by steeping hops for about an hour at temperatures (150-170° F) lower than found in conventional whirlpooling, then add the slurry into cooled wort before pitching yeast. Kirin found that the resulting beers contained as much linalool as dry hopped beers but less myrcene (which may mask fruity aromas associated with linalool and other oxygenated compounds). This also reduced production of 2M3MB (an onion-like off flavor).

Onion an off flavour? Don’t tell my Yuletide roasts. All in moderation, of course. And one last note. Stay within your means. Even Jude Law, the other lesser Leonardo DiCaprio, has issues with focusing on managing the load. Govern yourselves accordingly. Ho. Ho. And… ho.

There. Soon 2020 will be gone. Like I said about 1987. That one sucked. Let’s see how the last week of 2020 plays out but Trump’s going, we may now be past peak beer writer editor fawning and the vaccine is well on the way. Can’t be all bad. And remember that for more good reading check out the weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (who advocates for a blog renaissance this week… though it is funny that he says “paid=good”… just means obedient far too often.)  And remember BeerEdge, too. Go! Merry Christmas all you all. See you on New Year’s Eve.

The “If This Is December Do These Be Holidays?” Edition Of Beery New Notes

I have to say that imagining holidaying in any sense is a bit of a stretch for me and no doubt many others these days. Which tends to mean it is a good reason not to seek out strong drink but rather look elsewhere for meaning – like my choice this last few weeks: engaging in a prolonged and meaningful battle with the neighbourhood squirrels attacking my bird feeders. Think about it. Healthy outside-y lifestyle stuff getting out and setting up unstable and tall poles just out of a squirrel’s leap. Not quite what the doctor may have ordered on the Isle of Man between the wars as illustrated to the right but… is that really a doctor or the accounts manager of Clinch’s in disguise. And smoking! Dodgy looking moustache, that.

Victim of Math‘s starts us out on another week of pandemic laced news with a slight bit of economic upside news in the UK – or at least not a downside:

This is an interesting little nugget from the latest economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility… They expect alcohol duty revenue in 2020/21 to be *higher* than in 2019/20.

You may wish to roam the graphs and summaries of the associated Economic and Fiscal Outlook – November 2020 so here is the link to that. There’s this graph, too, that suggests in this economic downturn folk are turning to wine and spirits instead of beer. Are you?

Craft and shemomechama. Discuss.

Elsewhere and as it is to be expected, American big industrial beer is planning how to come out of the pandemic running. Beer & Beyond, the voice of MolsonCoors, Canada’s other secret infiltration force into the US economy right after Hollywood comedy movies, has asked the following about the marketplace:

With Americans heading into the holiday season, the beer industry is preparing for a winter fraught with uncertainty. A resurgent virus and ongoing recession are colliding with traditional times of elevated beer sales in both on- and off-premise venues.  One thing is for certain: People are continuing to drink beer. The big questions are where are they buying it, and how?

The article goes on to state “…data from past recessions show, the beer industry tends to hold up relatively well during economic downturns…” which is true as far as it goes* but it will be interesting to see how this principle holds up where local policy driven pandemic triggering full on economic depressions are occurring in, for example, the non-masker alt-right parts of rural America.

Speaking of pandemic ridden landscapes of elsewhere, I fear I am not fully convinced by this week’s excellent article “I Am Gruit” but it is very gratifying that author Hollie Stephens did consult with one of Unger‘s texts:

“The power to control to sale of gruit was in effect a right to levy a tax on beer production” writes Unger. Public figures who had been granted gruitrecht sought to extend their power throughout their domains. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, towns had taken over the taxation of gruit, handing the task of producing the gruit mixture over to a gruiter and ensuring that it was sold on to brewers at a fixed price.

It’s about the sense of scale. My reading of Unger’s work on gruit is that the scale of production  (which went far beyond foraging) and resulting wealth it generated sustained the early modern… or the late medieval… era in the Low Countries and was only displaced more by the cannon of the Hanseatic League‘s hopped beer pushing trading ships more than anything. But otherwise a entirely helpful introduction fitted into such a short space. And a Steve Beauchesne sighting!

Also this week,** Ron wrote three blog posts about a drunken abusive vicar in mid-1940s Dogmersfleld in Hampshire, the Rev. Hugo Dominique de la Mothe. The name itself is a give away but here’s a summary:

The accusations brought under the Clergy Discipline Act of 1892, Section 2, were that between June, 1942, and June, 1944, the rector had been frequently drunk, had “resorted to taverns and tippling.” had been guilty of immorality in that on or about May, 1944. at Dogmersfleld, he was in such a drunken condition that he committed a nuisance in the presence of women, and that he made derogatory references to the husband of Mrs. Maggie Robinson, his servant. 

Interesting that the matter held in Winchester Diocesan Consistory Court received such public notice. The cast of characters who show up as witnesses is gold.

In the now, the Tand Himself wrote this week about the new brewery in his home toun of Dumbarton, Scotland – even including a question and answer session with the owner thrown in for good measure:

The current production, as you’d expect, covers all the bases. One delight to this ex season ticket holder, is that the brewery produces the official beer of Dumbarton FC. This pleases me greatly as I remember all too well drinking in the Dumbarton FC Social Club – like the then football ground, but not the club – long gone. Then, we drank without a great deal of enthusiasm, beers from Drybroughs who had rather a monoclastic view of brewing, each beer being parti-gyled from a base beer which wasn’t great to start with. Mind you, we knew nothing of that then.

Less now but still somewhat tartaned, the history of Holsten Diät-Pils in the UK is the focus this week of an excellent post over at I Might Have A Glass of Beer:

In the 1980s so-called “premium lager” was the next big thing, as drinkers realised the watery draught lager nonsense they‘d been drinking wasn’t the real deal, and traded up to more fashionable bottled products. “More of the sugar turns to alcohol,” ran the tagline, alluding to strength in a way that got round the rules. The reference to the specially high attenuation was taken by drinkers to mean not so much  “you can drink this if you’re diabetic”, but more “this will get you pisseder, faster”. In comparison to most British beers, Diät Pils was a alcoholic monster: 45% stronger than a 4% bitter and nearly twice as strong as mild or the draught ersatz “lager” people had been drinking before.

Malt. This image to my right caught my eye this week representing trends in the last 20 years of England’s malt barley deliveries. The variety of varieties is quite stunning as are the names. Somewhat more sensible in tone than what we have to put up with the recent namings in hops. Very much settled on the planet Earth.

In further UK pubs and pandemic news, Stonch has found a sensible voice in Jonny Garrett:

…the REAL angle should be “pubs are SAFER than illegal gatherings at home”. They are controlled, clean, ventilated, so opening them could reduce home transmission. We need to campaign for that study.

This has been a line that Ontario’s Premier, Doug Ford, has been playing well. Best to be in well regulated settings. I still don’t go out that much but… you know… Elsewhere and to less effect, Pete B went wandering with some ideas on Scotch Eggs and alcohol absorption and governance models. Conspiracy abounds. But the £1,000 grant does seem a bit of the little and a bit of the too late, doesn’t it. Yet it’s in a combo of benefits we have on good word. So maybe it is…

Speaking of health… there was an excellent article in The Counter on the state of alcohol health disclaimers in the US and the role corporate lobbying plays to dumb it down with an interesting example from Canada’s north:

“I was surprised we were able to run it for [a month], honestly, before we got stopped,” said Stockwell, director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research and professor of psychology at the University of Victoria. “I was thinking that that was only because it was in the Yukon, out in the middle of nowhere. Nobody quite knew what was going on until the launch—that’s why we got away with it.”

Note: it is “…estimated that the cancer risk posed by drinking one bottle of wine a week was comparable to smoking five cigarettes for men and 10 for women in the same time span…” Excellently simple statement.

Finally, best beer blog interim research potentially becoming – but in no sense now – a fail yet… perhaps.

December, eh? Wasn’t quite expecting that. As you contemplate life’s passage once again, don’t forget to read your weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays (where this week they share a fear of teens and also speak of me, me, me!) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too. Go!

*See that handy graph link above just a bit.
**Because, you know, this is a weekly update sort of thing…

Your Final Thursday Beery News Notes For November 2020

Time flies when you are having fun. I’ve likely started more than one of these posts with that quip since this all began, haven’t I. Probably should have my head examined. Except. I have. Twice this week. Drove a pleasant drive to an hour and a half to a sleepy rural district hospital for one sort of probing on Monday and another sort nearer by this week. Nothing serious.* Poking and prodding. The joys of middle age with the next stage coming into view. If I get a third test this week, perhaps I might be given a top hat like the gent above. The image from the West Sussex Archives triggered a lot of interesting chat about the nature of their outfits and that clay pipe but it’s the beer mugs that are the show stopper. Are they pints or quarts? I have one smaller version, a 1940’s green Wedgewood which sits proudly on a shelf.

Speaking of which, the distinctions and differences between a Czech dimpled mug and an English dimpled mug were excellently explored this week by Casket Beer:

Yes. The distinction between these two glasses matters based on history and tradition. Aside from the subtle differences in design, they come from different places and have been vessels for different styles of beer. Further, getting it right adds to our experience when we drink, which is important for breweries in today’s market.

Me, I prefer to get some things wrong and take pleasure in how well they work out – like having IPA in a weissebier glass. Or in a frozen one. Speaking of being one’s own master in small matters, Matthew L wrote about the state of his personal nation as another lockdown struck from a consumer’s point of view:

The final straw for me was the aforementioned Tier 3 announcement.  All pubs not serving a “substantial meal” were to close.  That kiboshed most of my typical weekend.  I contemplated walking to Spoons, or any of the nearby places that do food, sitting on my own with a pizza and 2 pints, then going home (how many “substantial meals” can anyone consume in one day).  Any fun I’d have just wasn’t worth the effort on top of everything else I’d have to do.

Also from one consumer’s point of view comes this post from Kirsty of Lady Sinks the Booze on the moments she has missed, including missing the train:

Since getting a promotion and a pay rise I have done what many working class people do and tried desperately to avoid working class people. Instead of the bus (albeit the wifi enabled fancy express bus with nightclub style lighting) I now get the train, and pay over a ton for a monthly season ticket. Of course since privatisation there are three different trains home and because I’m tight I will never pay extra to get a different company’s train if I miss mine. Hence I will spend £9 on beer, to save the £5.60 train fare. 

Vaccines soon. That’s what I’m thinking. Others too – rather than pretending that owning a brewery means you know more than public health officials, Kenya‘s Tusker is sharing the safety message:

Speaking on the campaign, EABL Head of Beer Marketing, Ann Joy Muhoro, said, “Tusker believes that Kenyans can enjoy their favourite drink with friends in a safe and responsible manner, in line with the set protocols. That is why through the “dundaing” campaign, we are encouraging our consumers to adhere to the set health protocols, as they enjoy their Tuskerat home or at a bar.”

Historically-wise, Bailey and Boak studied the introduction of the jukebox into the UK pub and shared their findings:

This turns out to be surprisingly easy to pin down thanks to the novelty value of these electronic music boxes which guaranteed them press coverage. We can say, with some certainty, that the first pub jukeboxes arrived in Britain in the late 1940s. Even before that date, though, the term ‘jukebox’ or ‘juke-box’ was familiar to British people through reportage from the US.

Best “political tweet with a side of beer” of the week. Second best “political tweet with a side of beer” of the week. Best tweek of the week:

Currently slightly obsessed with TGL-7764, the East German standard for beer. It‘s basically a beer style guideline with some brewing instructions. Only thing I struggle with is colour, though, it‘s provided in NFE and „Einheiten nach Brand“ and I have no idea what these are.

And then he followed up with a link to the TGL-7764. Neato. Similarly mucho neato, Stan wrote about the 107 words to describe hops but neither “twiggy” nor “lawnmower driven into a weedy ditch” appear so I am not sure I can give it all much credit. But that’s just me.

In China, new fangled hydrogen fueled trucks are being used to deliver beer:

The Asian subsidiary of beverage giant Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV, meanwhile, added four hydrogen fuel-cell trucks to its fleet, the company announced Sept. 28. It plans to deliver beer using the trucks, making China the first nation where the company has deployed such vehicles for beer shipments.

Martyn found an excellent  cartoon from 32 years ago, framing the thoughts from the time about low and no alcohol beer. I have to say I am of the same mind. It can lead to things, that sort of thing. Just this week I watched as two fully grown adults who have always appeared to have a complete set of marbles going on about the wonders of sparking water. Which they seem to be paying money for. Money they earn. With effort.

My thoughts, as always were, “historic beer style” is an oxymoron. “Style” is a modern international construct, a form to which brewers brew. As Ron has effectively proven, forms of beer in the past were brewed to brew house standards to meet local market expectations. Different names for similar things and similar names for different things were far too common.** Andreas Krennmair*** explored both the oxy and the moron in his post this week about Dampfbier which has that added excitement of relating to a variant of “steam” – a word so many want to own but never seem to understand:

The problem here is… if a beer style’s origin story sounds too good to be true, it probably is not actually rooted in history. Naive me would simply ask why other beers like Weißbier brewed with wheat malt wouldn’t be called the same name because supposedly, the yeast would ferment as vigorous. When we actually look at historic sources though, an entirely different picture is unveiled…

And lastly, Matty C. had an article published this week on a topic near and dear to my heart – the disutility of all the artsy fartsy craft beer cans:

Important stuff like beer style and ABV is too often – in my opinion – printed in a tiny font to make space for more artwork, or isn’t even featured on the front of a can at all. And while this isn’t an issue for most hardened beer fans, for those who exist outside of beer fandom’s bubble (and let’s be honest with ourselves here, that’s most people) it’s actually making it more difficult for people to differentiate between brands. The result of this? Consumers turning back to old, faithful brands – probably owned by big multinational corporations – and turning away from craft beer. 

The phrase I shared was “barfing gumball machine” for these things. Much other similarly thoughtful comment was shared.

Done! Soon – December!!! Meantime, don’t forget to read your weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too. Go!

*Weirder and weirder I am. Seems I have a fully formed molar deep set up into my cheek bone. It is not doing anything. Just sitting there. Thanks for paying your taxes so that could be confirmed.
**I linked it up there! Why are you looking here, too?
***Pour le double!!!!

The Thursday Beery News Notes For The Week Before The Neighbour’s Holiday Season Begins

A quiet week. Not surprising in mid-November, I suppose. Being next to the United States and, even more to the point, being within the FM broadcast range of local US based heavy metal FM radio station, it is difficult not to be aware that something is starting. Their unending holiday season is upon us. In Canada, the holiday season is really, say, December 10th… maybe… until the last of the bought-once-annually Grand Marnier is shaken into a coffee sometime in early January. Weeks, not months. In the US, the future is now. Which means we have turkey and beer pairing blurts clogging up the news. Do these really affect beer sales… or turkey sales for that matter? Get back to me on that.

What’s really going on? Max got out and about. That’s nice. And real. While we are locked down in one way or another, it’s good to find some outdoors. I’ve taken up staring at the sky at night myself. I have really fallen for Epsilon Lyrae myself, which makes sense for a Canadian seeing as it is a double double. I even bought a 20x to 60x scope, the sort of thing also used to bird watch or be a creepy neighbour. The Pleiades alone at 20X are worth the price of admission. And you can drink a beer as you gawk. If you have to. Just sayin’.

Whatever you are experiencing, it could be worse. You could be caught up in the Tomsk Beer Company scandal in Siberia:

The Investigative Committee said earlier that Ivan Klyain is suspected of using his official post to illegally prevent the construction of a building in 2016-2017 on territory close to the Tomsk Beer company, which he controls. The 61-year-old Klyain has served as the mayor of Tomsk since 2013. Before being appointed to the post, he had been the director-general of the Tomsk Beer company, one of the largest breweries in the region, since 1994. After becoming mayor, his wife was elected by Tomsk Beer’s board of directors as the facility’s director-general.

Bad. Bad bad. But the good news is that beer in stadiums is coming back in Tatarstan!

Elsewhere and for the great indoorsmen amongst us, Pete Brown and a few others commented on the  four episode BBC2 TV broadcast Saving Britain’s Pubs hosted by someone named Tom Kerridge. Now, if we are lucky this will show up as a cheap filler on Sunday afternoon on PBS or TVO sometime in 2023 so I have time. Maybe. Rather than a documentary followed by panel format on UK licensing policy, it actually sounds like just a restaurant refit sorta show that pre-dates, you know, the pandemic:

If there’s a common theme running through all four pubs in the series, it’s that the people running them need to add a keener, shrewder business eye to the the long list of talents they already display in running pubs that are popular but not profitable. The things a pub needs to do to survive may not always got down well with the regulars: The first thing Tom tells the Prince Albert to do is put up the beer prices. The domino players nursing one beer all night in the Golden Anchor are shifted to the back room to make way for the craft beer-drinking hipsters who are gentrifying the area.

Yeah, get those happy regulars the hell out of here! But… remember people shifting spots in a bar? Remember people in bars? 2019 was great, wasn’t it? Maybe it’s really just to be taken as a show about the before times. But talking about beer has a notoriously poor track record when it comes to TV… and radio… and newspapers… and so Mudgie also shared his thoughts:

People still like the idea of pubs in theory, but in practice they visit them less and less. Of course it is still possible to do well in a declining market, but that should not be allowed to obscure the wider picture. By and large, the reason so many pubs have closed is not because they haven’t been run as well as they could have been. And it was disappointing, if not entirely surprising, that an entire hour discussing the decline of the pub trade passed by without a single mention of the legendary Elephant in the Room…

Good point. There was a slow death well underway before the more rapid form came along. Speaking of which and on the smaller small screen… is it just me or did Craft Beer Web Event replace Beer e-Publication Editor** as the odd new thing of 2020? Seems like that to me based on the barrage of beery things to watch on line for the last week or two’s worth of Thursdays to Sundays. Not that I watched any. It’s getting like those 47 global beer awards things. Too Organic, if you know what I mean.*** I felt particularly badly seeing as two of my own co-authors were presenting at two of these web events – but they spoke at the same time, I simply could not in good conscience choose one over the other.

Speaking of webby things podcasts, Beer with Ben* finds someone called Ben with interesting things to say about beer and its beginnings:

I’m back for a second series and this time we will be taking a journey through history, as well as beer. 2020 will see us finding out how our earliest counterparts would have made those first brews, look to the local environment to forage and find some of the ingredients and, of course, see if it’s possible to do it ourselves.

Excellent. That sounds really real and not in decline even if likely… organic.***

And speaking of odd jobs sort of in beer, I have no idea what this is if it is not a overly fancified web intern in the ABev macro construct. Consider these strange but assigned tasks:

– Work cross-functionally to plan and manage the Organic Social content calendar which supports key activations across both brand and eCommerce.
– Manage the content creation process for both Paid and Organic Social, from brief to delivery.
– Upload and schedule Organic Social content.

Caught up with excitement by the prospect? Me neither. Nice to know the opposite of “paid” is “organic” which is perhaps a comment on what is left of you and your span of years when you go unpaid too long.

Somewhat to the right on the scale of things that are cryptic was ATJ in Pellicle wandering on and about lagers this week. I wonder if he might benefit from a backyard telescope. The over ripe prose is pungent:

I am both mystified and enthralled whenever I think of the deep sleep of lagering, the process that brings the raw ingredients of the beer into a sharper focus. Enchantment touches me like a spell when I consider the steampunk-like nature of some of the brewing techniques such as lautering and decoction mashing. Then, as if conjured up by some celestial agent, there is the aristocratic elegance of noble hops, which, when writing its entry for the Oxford Companion to Beer, I was surprised to discover that it was a marketing term from the 1970s instead of something from the days of Hansel and Gretel.

Heavens! All very prog. Fortunately, sensible Stan sent around his hops newsletter with it’s dedication to a plain speaking, staid and common sense outlook when it comes to hops – with an update on Hopfen and Stopfen:

The verb stopfen has a slightly different meaning. It is used when repairing clothes or to be more precise darning socks. But more importantly it’s the same word (potentially even etymologically) as to stuff. Whether you want to say one stuffs a pillow with feathers or food into oneself, the word stopfen can always be applied. Hopfenstopfen is therefore the act of stuffing beer with hops, which I guess is an even more fitting term now with all the hazy beers around.

Not at all organic, that. Pretty real, too.

That’s it. As I say, a quiet week. But don’t forget to read your weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays (this week Jordan speaks warmly of Tom Arnold) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too. Go!

*h/t to Merryn. The podcast comes in multiples of series which is odd as Ben told me they come in multiples of seasons.  Note: Ben’s Beer Blog is not associated with Beer with Ben. 
**I actually saw some folk fawning over their favourtie best beer writing editors the other day. Tres Organique!
***Wait for it!

 

These Thursday Beer News Notes Have Me In Stitches

Thanks for all the cards and flowers. As hinted last week, the eyelid is now 19% smaller which makes it all 100%  better. I’ve spent the week on meds and on the sofa so, no doubt, these will be less dynamic in terms of being actual new notes than those to which you have become accustomed. Maybe. Best thing noticed of the week? As if a personal gift in my half dazed troubled state, Lily Waite posted a picture of a stoneware mug/stein she made from a lighter Draycott clay. Fabulous and cheery.

Did anything else happen this week? Oh, yes! A US election. America is still divided but as the graph just below shows, along lines that indicate that there might be more to it that mere political allegiance as the accompanying tweet explained. Resentment and widely held prosperity don’t always mix well. Best Biden-based fact:

Washington D.C. liquor store owners say supporters of President-elect Joe Biden have purchased more champagne bottles Saturday than during the previous two New Year’s Eve celebrations combined.

Boak and Bailey shared interesting thoughts about what in the wine world might be considered bottle variation, a hallmark of the real:

For us, a little inconsistency introduced on the front line, in pubs, is part of the way we get to really appreciate a beer we love – not beer being served in poor condition here, just the difference say in drinking ESB that’s been on for one day as opposed to two, three or four.

I’m all in. Here in Ontario, there is a micro era style known as dark ale. If you are lucky the cask is old but not too old which means there is a slight tang that cuts the cloy. Note: your contemporary tin ‘o juice-muck won’t offer that experience. It’ll just explode in your hand. Stan re-upped the related beer rule #4 in reply.

Also here in Ontario, Ron Redmond reported on the response one brewery has made facing allegations of discriminatory services:

Before long, Cowbell also noticed and quickly issued an apology that was sadly lacking in one regard. The apology itself. That further infuriated people. However, I was somewhat heartened to read that they were planning to reach out to Ren, Ontario’s reigning Beer Diversity Monarch, (a hail and hearty “Long live the Queen!”) to come to the brewery and do that thing she does so well. And that is, “plain-splain” why the Ontario Craft Beer industry needs to be to be more inclusive towards the BIPOC and LGBTQ2 communities. As a member of both, Ren is uniquely equipped to calmly, rationally and even happily explain its importance to people, even those as dense as myself.

The path forward is not smooth as Don notes. Not everyone is ready to move on… but that is a reasonable response and one to be expected when serving a thoughtful consumer base. Relatedly, BA Bart posted a review of an academic text, Beer and Racism: How Beer Became White, Why it Matters, and the Movements to Change It by N. Chapman and D. Brunsma.

And very sad news this week with the passing of Bill White of Better With Beer and many other things, a man whose expertise touched all aspects of Ontario’s beer industry. Many tributes here, here and here.

Despite the Raging Orange being on the way out, the big news remains the global pandemic and how folk are coping. In the UK, there seems to be resistance to the idea that:

Britons flouted lockdown in their hundreds of thousands in London today as a market was packed with visitors helping themselves to takeaway beer on the first weekend of new coronavirus lockdown restrictions.

Looking forward, JJB has some interesting thoughts on what the world after looks like in 2021:

When the vaccines are deployed and life returns to normal, rent arrears will be demanded, business rates will return, VAT will go back up, furlough will end and there’ll be a huge destruction in the hospitality industry as a result (and lots of opportunities for survivors)…

Interesting. Certainly after the collapse of the late 1990s there was a surplus of brewing equipment that led to the easier entry early era of craft in the early 2000s. Will those with cash again ride the new wave of the vaccinated boom. Of course they will. As noted a number of times before, debt drowns as it depends on continuing upside.

Looking backwards in this week’s edition of Historian’s Corner, here’s an interesting video with Sir Geoff Palmer describing the role of James Watt at the outset of industrial brewing. Watt was from my father’s home city in Scotland so if you want to hear hearsay versions of any erroneous folk tales of early pump tech let me know.

By way of warning of the temptations of free samples, The Beer Nut himself shared a live update on the new Guinness 0.0:

This is very much an idea whose time has come and I can see it doing well. Edit on 11/11/2020: Diageo have just announced a total product recall due to microbiological contamination. I haven’t suffered any ill effects but you can’t be too careful.

Elsewhere, I spotted an early response to the challenge posted by Boak and Bailey (one we should all take up) to write on the theme of something about beer or pubs that’s always puzzled you? Over in The Mad Brewer’s Notebook we read:

Can you imagine going into the supermarket and then finding out how much your shopping is after it’s bagged and you’re committed to purchasing whatever you have? Can you imagine doing online shopping and finding out the cost when you look at your bank statement? Walking out a bank and complaining to your mates you only found out your mortgage interest rate was 20% after you’d signed the paperwork? Of course not, prices are clearly labelled, you can figure out how much you’re spending as you’re going along. But this is very much the not situation in most British pubs.

Finally, yesterday was Remembrance Day here in Canada and I have been thinking of the time I stayed with a pal in 1986 in Islington area of London. We went into his small local pub, the long shut Old Parrs Head I think, and I was introduced around as a second Canadian. Not long into the session, someone cracked that we should talk to the old guy in the corner to much guffaw. He’s Canadian, too, we were told. We looked at each other, didn’t see the joke and went over to the older man. The place went oddly quiet. We introduced ourselves and could quickly see he was in a rough way, damaged by alcohol. Turns out he was from Saskatchewan. A farmer’s kid who fought in WW2, fighting the Nazis though Holland in the 1940s. When he was released from his service he got a telegram from his family that said “don’t come back, there’s nothing here for you.” So he sat in London for the next four decades, making do but drinking himself to death. The pub owner came over after a while and joined us as we chatted away. He was a bit in shock. “Christ,” he said, “I didn’t know he could speak.” The vet had been sitting silently in that corner of the pub when he had bought the place.

Don’t forget to read your weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays (this week Jordan shares his love of Windsor!!!) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too. Go!

Your Election Results Swamp All Interest In Thursday Beery News Notes News Notes

I started writing this before the closing of polls in the US, late afternoon Tuesday. It’s a bit of an odd week for me, filled with important work related discussions, a long evening of election night coverage as well as undergoing a voluntary, long planned but slightly disconcerting introduction of tiny number of tiny stiches into my right eyelid.  For all I know, here as I write, none of that will matter when you read this as new chaos or just strange confusion may be raging by Thursday to the nation of the south. Well… to be frank getting eyelid stitches will matter to me. And even to you, perhaps just momentarily, if you have said “yik” in your mind once or twice while reading this paragraph. It’s OK. I’ve said it myself, too.

Frankly, I’m sort of glad for that personal distraction. Jeff wrote about managing this election week… and his hopes for what’s to come. It’s now 11 pm Eastern on Tuesday night and those dreams of a healing many not quite be coming true:

I want so desperately to return to a time when hazy IPAs are the most contentious issue before us. Given the stakes and the emotional energy, we’ll desperately need beer and all it provides to manage and heal the damage this election will almost certainly inflict. I’ll be back to decoction mashing and double dry hop beers soon enough. In the meantime, I want to express my best wishes to all of you, whatever your political stripe. Being a citizen in a democracy can be hard work. We’ll need to find a well of grace and goodwill to get through the next week. And beer. Lots and lots of beer.  

Or maybe less beer. Think about it. Stan wrote a best of list, made a bit of fun about writing a list but still stuck to the true core goal of any good list by listing only beers that are utterly inaccessible to 94.7% of anyone reading the list. But it does include this fabulously swinging observation:

… reading vintage notes is a guilty pleasure. You can find online what rock critic Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell wrote in 1975 for Oui magazine. Their notes include this lovely entry about Straub in Pennsylvania: “At moments, we thought this was just wonderful and wrote down comments like ‘springy’ and ‘soft-edged.’ Then at other times, like now, too drunk to know if we were more or less drunk than we had been the times before, we wondered what we could have meant.”

Glory days. When was that exactly? Forty-five years ago. In a skin mag? Now, is it the case that all we have left is the question of whether it is actually nice to know people are getting paid to write about beer even if the writing isn’t of any use? Isn’t that up there with drinking 46 witbiers before lunch without thinking anyone might consider that a bit of a negative in the context of the drinking’s own purpose? While we are at it, should those others, the influencers be saved or chucked out? What else is running out of ideas? Does all that fit into Jeff’s forward thinking purer hopes… or will we look elsewhere, perhaps even slumping back a la Oui‘s particularly piquant context for those tasting notes?

Elsewhere, in the UK they are in another sort of temporal loop with the reintroduction of lockdown. Stonch wrote last Sunday about the rush before the coming end times V.2.0:

…aaaand we’re fully booked for lunch again. However at about 4:30pm tables will start becoming free for a last hurrah for drinkers. We won’t be opening on Wednesday so this will be our last day of trading pre-lockdown… 

Things are getting incendiary in Britain, with the Morning Advertiser suggesting the pandemic response is actually a stealth war on pubs. That’s a bit thick. As with here in Ontario, it’s really about folk dealing with partial data, guesstimates and trying to do the right thing. It’s be nice if we could just get back to arguing about packaging options with a wee soupçon of ad hominem like in the good old days?

Yes! The past. Surely that must be a safe space. Umm. No, it isn’t. Marty the Zed told us the tale of The Most Dangerous Brewing In The World:

The Quetta brewery must rank as one of the most difficult postings of any brewer’s career. According to Henry Whymper the sun was “so intensely hot, even in the winter months, that a brewer has to wear a sun helmet whilst at the same time he has to clothe himself in a fur-lined coat to protect himself from the biting cold which there is in the shade … 

Excellent. And for the double, M’ d’Z’ also wrote about the blegging for a Guinness 0.0… but is it an ethical question if it’s doubtful as to whether it’s even really beer? I hope the style guides get updated to take into account all the not-beer beers. The not-beer experts will demand it, right?

What is real? Who are the trusted? Where is the foothold that can give us even a glimpse of reality? Surely, the Tand’s the one for that and his review of the latest Protzean prose, The Family Brewers of Britain, provides promise:

It is these companies that are the subject of this book, which describes in detail how the families had mixed fortunes and how they arrived at where they are today. All had the shared problems of war, deaths, economic depressions and more, but while some overcame these by good management and internal agreement, others saw bad management, fraternal fallouts, splits, disagreements over money, policy and more. All are faithfully chronicled in Roger’s usual meticulous style.

Speaking of publications, interesting to get an email for “Style Trends”, a monthly communication from MC Basset, LLC with the URL www.thebeerbible.com which has nothing to do with the book, The Beer Bible. Confusion reigns. Except I am Scottish Presbyterian genetically which means that they are both definitely going to Scottish Presbyterian genetic hell. But not the Protz. He’s safe.

Now it is Wednesday morning. Bleary headed but heading out soon to travel to the city where the guy who will cut my face lives and works. Which, for some reason, reminds me to mention Ben’s podcast. While the medium is entirely inferior without any indexing and too many podcasters putting us all through their dreary revenue streams of ads and the mumblymumbly… mumbly, Ben is actually not sucking at it. This week he did the remarkable and provided an hour plus long interview with Toronto’s Jason Fisher on the state of his brewery, Indie Alehouse, and the state of Ontario’s craft beer industry. It is a little bit rich that the history was rewritten, that it’s now bad to add fruit flavouring compared to, you know, 2014 – but that’s craft for you.

Catching up with the US results mid-day mid-week, it’s interesting to see that Oregon approved the legalization of psilocybin mushrooms. Now, watch the beer writers suddenly become psilocybin mushroom geniuses: pronouncing on the market, the issues and the loopholes in the law.

Finally, Dr. J posted a few good thoughts about a presentation she was giving today… by which I mean yesterday:

“BREAKING NEWS: A Randomly Scheduled Brewery Hip-Hop Night Failed to Make the Brewery’s Customer Base More Diverse.” We can all get a good chuckle from efforts like these, but the truth of the matter is that too many efforts to diversify taprooms result in… inauthentic pandering. In this talk, Dr. J will introduce a way to rethink relationship-building with your future fans that leads to lasting, mutually beneficial relationships.

Good. Hopeful. If it’s archived, go watch. BTW, I once considered calling this blog “Inauthentic Pandering” – but the name was already taken too many times.

I know. It’s all a bit higgled with the piggled up above. Will next week be better? Next month? Next year? Will I post a stitch pic? Dunno. Meantime, read your weekly updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays (this week Jordan sent a coded secret message in the guise of news about a new brewery in my town letting me know there was a new brewery in my town) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too. Go!

 

The Last Thursday Beery News Notes For October 2020, The US Election And My Tomato Plants

It’s been difficult to cope with the changing of the seasons as I have for every other year I’ve ever been on the planet. Familiar things – like heat or evenings – just seem to have gone away. But the week of Hallowe’en every four years helps set a milestone that’s hard not to stub your toe upon. So here we are. Orange leaves turning to wet bran flakes in the ditch.  Speaking of orange, I saw the image above passing by upon the glowing screen this week, one of a series of four pub scenes by Ruskin Spear (1911-90) whose art included “the citizens of Hammersmith relaxing in local pubs.” Happy people in pubs… or not… also was the topic of my Zoom chat with Boak and Bailey. We had never met before but we chatted away for two hours last Sunday. Blogging. Brewing history. Pandemic. Gossip. Very grateful to have been invited by them.  I took a very fuzzy photo to commemorate the moment.

Out there in a more focused reality, Jessica Mason wrote wonderfully about visiting a neighbour:

I wondered, momentarily, if I should tell her what I did for a living when I wasn’t visiting people in the mornings. Tell her about the industry I worked in. About the drinks and hospitality sector or any of the magazines for which I’d written. I wanted so much for her to know that it wasn’t just her feeling lost and alone. That entire sectors of society had been overlooked and that the paucity of support for those in need had begun to force people into poverty. Do I tell her that I’m really a drinks and pubs writer? That later on that day I’d be at a desk looking for the right words to describe something that made people feel good and interested. Things that reflected our thoughts, tastes and individuality.

In Scotland, a ruling has come down on the meaning of cafe during pandemic, the sort of ruling we may be seeing more and more of in the coming weeks and months as the cold and dark comes upon us. In this case, an injunction was granted against a municipal order to shut based upon the legal principle “surely to heavens this could not be a cafe!”:

“The council’s main, final reason for forcing us to close was that some of our dishes were ‘too smart and too fancy’ for us to be considered a cafe. “Nothing in the law dictates how smart you can or can’t have your food in a cafe.” One20 was granted an interim suspension order by the Court of Session after an online hearing on Friday, 23 October and remains open this weekend.

Further to the south, in Manchester a different legal consideration on the nature of food service was before the Covid considering authorities:

The head of Greater Manchester Police Licensing got on the blower to let us know that Slice Gate has been revisited and our Nell’s Pizza slices (cut from 22 inch pizzas) are now officially deemed substantial.

And to the left, further west, we learn of this heartwarming tale from Northern Ireland:

A man threw a tin of beer over a PSNI officer and shouted “Up the ‘Ra” after being told to return home during the lockdown, a court heard yesterday. Neil Murphy (37) was given 12 months probation for the assault on police and disorderly behaviour outside his flat in north Belfast.

Nice one, Neil. Well handled pandemic response. What’s the “‘Ra”? Short form for the “‘Rona”?

Ryan Avent of The Economist wrote a worthwhile series of tweets that add up to a good remembrance of the phenomenon of blogging which, of course, continues hereabouts and many other places under other names including journalism:

Blog posts could of course blow up. But the potential for instant mass virality was smaller, because drawing attention to blog posts meant creating a post of one’s own, and even link roundups took a bit of effort… As snarky as blogging could be, the medium generally demanded a minimal level of argument and contextualization greater than what’s asked of twitter users: if, at least, one wanted to attract others’ time and attention.

Going further back, Eoghan posted a photo of his beer book bookshelf and started a trend in posting photos of one’s beer book bookshelves.  Me, I have more piles and piles of piles of books by the easy chair myself. There’s a copy of The Chronicles of the Maltmen Craft in Glasgow 1605-1879 in there somewhere. Which I know makes you all riddled with jealousy.

Be prepared. Whenever anyone posts a graph for any reason at all, I am going to quote this guy who wins for this week’s most fabulous gnumbskullery*:

I think that’s hard to conclude from this chart. It might still be true, but i think it’s a lot more complex with alot more unanswered questions.

One of my personal heroes is Katie Mathers, as you may have guessed, and I am saddened to hear that she has met up with the virus… but cheered that she’s found a positive angle:

…it’s actually quite cool that I have something that’s spread all over the world. A big viral connection to the globe…

Here is an update to the story from the Ithaca NY area, the one about the brewery that had to close because it brewed old school micros that no one wanted. Well, the facility has been bought but some downstate operation”

Big aLICe, headquartered in Long Island City, Queens, has reached a deal to buy the former GAEL Brewing Co. on State Route 14 just south of Geneva on Seneca Lake. GAEL owner George Adams announced his brewery’s closing earlier this month. Big aLICe co-owners Kyle Hurst and Scott Berger hope to have the new brewery and taproom open early in 2021. Big aLICe, which also has a tasting room in Brooklyn, is known for a wide range of beers, from hazy New England IPAs and pilsners to sours and barrel-aged brews.

Well, there is some sort of lesson there. You can shape it as you like.

In other business news, we hear a lot about the challenges faced by the hospitality sector and how it affects brewing but here is an interesting story about the challenges faced by Canadian drinks exporters:

…beer exports are down too. Year-to-date sales to the end of July are down 13 per cent compared to the same period last year, trade association Beer Canada data show. Pacific Rim Distributors, the leading distributor of B.C. craft beer, has certainly felt pandemic pain. “We saw a deeper drop in sales in the first quarter because COVID-19 hit Asia before North America,” says Garett Senez, vice-president of marketing for the North Vancouver-based firm representing 13 craft brewers in 19 foreign markets.

Interesting that Ontario’s own “Collective Arts plans to open a satellite brewery in Brooklyn next year.”

Otherwise, beer continues to get more and more boring according to the latest Euro-gak news:

Drinks giants have reported higher alcohol-free beer sales in the latest sign the low- and no-alcohol drinks sector continues to grow. Heineken and Carlsberg have both created alcohol-free versions of their flagship beer labels, Belgian brewer AB InBev recently launched a low-alcohol alternative to Stella Artois, and this week drinks giant Diageo launched a booze-free version of Guinness in Britain and Ireland. Danish brewer Carlsberg – behind the Tuborg and Kronenbourg brands – on Wednesday reported a 29% growth across its alcohol-free brews in the three months to September, compared to the same period last year.

Similarly, the Boston Seltzer and Hard Iced Tea Co. has seen its shares soar.

Speaking of the tactics of macro-gak, Heineken in the UK has been caught forcing its own pubs to sell its own beer… which sounds a bit weird to someone not in the UK:

Heineken has been fined £2m for forcing publicans to sell “unreasonable” amounts of its own beers and ciders. The pubs code adjudicator (PCA), an official who oversees the relationship between pub-owning companies and their tenants, said Heineken had “seriously and repeatedly” breached laws that protect publicans from company behaviour aimed at prohibiting pubs selling competitor brands.

Finally, to top off a less than cheery week, Jeff noted the extinguishment of the All About Beer online archives. I was more written of than wrote in that organ but it did speak to an era or two, thriving in micro times, collapsing under a shoddy hand through perhaps the peak of craft. We have left that behind.

There you are. Less actual beer news that most weeks. But remember that, as the days shorten in the coming darkest third of the year northern hemispherically speaking, there’s more out there. Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays (this week Jordan skips his obligations to the sponsors!!!) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too.

*The “g” is sometimes even silent.

The Thursday Beery News Notes For The Second Third of The Tenth Twelfth

It’s hard coming up with new headlines every week, isn’t it. Look at that up there. It hardly makes any sense at all. And it’s getting a bit hard coming up with light entertaining content about beer to share. It’s usually all about something other than beer or like beer or nearly about beer. Like the best thing I saw this week – the tweet accompanied by the image to the left, captioned:

Toddlers in the 1970s looked like pensioners waiting for happy hour in a working men’s club.

This week, let’s look at stories about beer. Beery stories. You bet. Not about something related to beer or something just associated with beer. Hey, Jordan wrote something about beer… or actually drew it. He has created a map and a spreadsheet of all the current breweries and contract beer companies (firms which by beer from actual brewers, including on contract) on Ontario. It’s on his site and over to the right under the dropdown thingie. There. Help him by sending corrections… err, updates. Everyone likes that.

That’s about beer, right? Sure… well, maybe. Is this about beer? Ron wrote about UK cask during WW2 – not cask ale, just the wood in the casks:

In normal times British brewers would never have used American oak as it imparted too much flavour to the beer it contained. Unlike today, brewers wanted to avoid any trace of oak in their beer. Its presence was seen as a fault. But, with the supply of Memel oak dried up, brewers had little choice. When supplies of American oak in turn began to evaporate, brewers had to turn to a more local source.

OK, may be not but it was about something touching beer. Stan! Stan writes about beer like he did last week. He wrote again and got published again – this time about hop creep… which is not actually about the loud loser at the end of the bar in the crafty tavern:

“Hop Creep” isn’t the name of a beer-themed horror movie—just a real, ongoing mystery that brewers and hop scientists are still sorting out. Oregon State University’s Tom Shellhammer, one of the country’s top brewing scientists, says that his earliest moments of being introduced to the phenomenon were about five years ago, although he didn’t realize it at the time. “I was giving a talk at the 2015 Craft Brewers Conference, and somebody in the Q & A asked, ‘Hey, do you see people getting diacetyl when they dry hop?’ I was like, ‘No.’” Diacetyl is one result of hop creep. Beer with more alcohol than a brewery intended—which brewers call “out of spec”—is another, as are bottles or cans with dangerously high levels of carbonation.

Hops! Hops are in beer. And, in his return to London pubs and the blogging of same, the Tand put the beer into the Tand:

…there was a mission to accomplish. A visit to a Sam’s pub to establish London prices following the recent price increase. We chose the John Snow… a nice little boozer and trade was steady on this Wednesday afternoon.  I had the stout, which needed the gas changing, while E had a half of Pure Brewed. The price list was snapped when the barman wasn’t looking and duly posted to a certain Curmudgeon. Prices are on the wickedly high side and now by no means a bargain. It does make you wonder how they’ll compete on this basis.  One other thing. The notices forbidding this and that, which are found all over Northern Sam’s pubs, are conspicuous by their absence. I know. I checked everywhere. Double standards from Mr Smith it seems.

Hardly anything about the excellent Pellicle post this week by Helen Jerome on a cidery in Devon was about beer, but it did start with expected traditional character profile on the person behind the operation in question, deviating only by finding someone who was not first an unhappy accountant:

Spool back to late 2015, and Polly decided she’d had enough of sitting in an office. She needed a fresh challenge. Growing up in Devon, she gained a foundation in science with A-levels in chemistry, physics and biology; taken a module with Master of Wine Susan McCraith while doing a degree in Equine Business; studied Sustainable Agriculture at postgraduate level, then completed an EU-funded ‘slow food’ study tour in Tuscany. She’d never really been into cider though… 

Speaking of science and even a bit about beer, Ed wrote about the scourge of taking the free case of beer and how that ethical flaw of his gnaws at his very soul – except there was a twist:

As every beer blogger knows getting free beer is the easiest thing in the world. Though breweries might grizzle about it, threaten them with a bad review and they’re sending you a case of beer as fast as their little legs can carry it. But despite this due to my insatiable greed I immediately said yes when offered a Hobgoblin beer and bugs snack pack.

Speaking of which, BBC News itself ran an excellent piece on social median influencers – aka what used to be called blegging – and the associated cap in hand:

Like many businesses during Covid-19, Reshmi has seen a change in her customers’ behaviour. Although many people cut back on unnecessary purchases, her bakery was busy as people carried on ordering her celebration cakes. Yet she also noticed influencers were asking for more freebies too. It’s something she has done in the past – looking at the influencer and their posts, who follows them, how they engage with their audience, but says it didn’t work for her. “We have never had a sale off someone [saying] they saw our cake on someone’s post or profile, it’s always been through word of mouth, from paying customers.”

This is interesting. Even if cake is not beer. I have heard many a chortler and scribe announce that “it’s not like anyone could think I have compromised myself by the free samples” but it’s not something you can really say for yourself. And it never plays out that way. Best to pay your way. Folk notice and note. Unless there are edible bugs involved.

Related, the question of free food in pubs. Discuss.

Suzy Aldridge posted something of a goodbye to all that in response to a BrewDog franchise opening up in her English city of Lincoln:

Now I’m out. It’s surreal. I’m looking in from the outside and seeing the struggles in the industry, seeing how friends are marching on. I almost feel left behind, lost, but also that I’ve escaped. I’ve sidestepped into a new career path by pure luck. It’s not something I love like beer but it’s interesting, it pays the bills and, unlike hospitality, the rug won’t be swept from under my feet, then shoved back, then removed again. I’m comfortable, even as I drink some of the very last bottles of Lincolnshire Brewing Co that are in my fridge. 

Eoghan Walsh posted a new podcast at Brussels Beer City featuring an interview with Jean Van Roy of Brussels brewery Brasserie Cantillon. He wisely avoided raising my accusations of 2006 but, still, had a good beery chat:

On a scorching hot early September day on the eve of brewing season for Cantillon, we met at a bar influential not only for the city but also for him, and his family brewery. We talk lambic evangelisation in a country that still doesn’t really get it, his youthful escapades drinking crap beer with friends, how is approach to brewing has changed thanks to his relationships with winemakers and chefs, and how the brewery’s corridors ring hollow and lonely in the absence of American, Italian and other foreign accents.

Elsewhere, you know there is nothing going on in beer in some corners if the discussion turns to flat flavoured water with vodka added.

Speaking of beer and corners, in this week’s edition of That Sorta Happened in Beer History, Mudge the Elder asked this question and got answers:

It’s before my time, but does anyone remember (or have talked to those who do) whether waiter service was commonplace in pubs across the UK in the 50s and 60s, or was it primarily a Northern thing?

A whole new world was revealed to mine eyes.  Someone identifying themselves only as “[Bx2-B=R]” stated:

Primarily northern, my Lancastrian mum says, and common enough there that she didn’t find it weird; down south, mostly seems to have been an inter-war fad in big new pubs and died out with WWII. [Ray]

Talk of bell pushes, tipping and waiters in burgundy jackets with “silver” trays ensued.  Sit down before you start through the thread.

Beer crime of a newer sort happened over in Michigan, as noted by the worst beer blogger ever:

…there was no money on the premise, and luckily no vandalism, but the intruders were there for more than a half an hour. “They ended up pouring nine beers,” he said. “It’s not somebody having a quick beer and leaving.” One of the men called someone and then soon, a bunch of kids entered the premises, running around and looking through the brewery’s merchandise. Luckily, the kids seemed to only have pop, not alcohol…

Another sort of loss is happening in bars like this out of Winnipeg that I don’t think I’ve seen reported in this way before even though it is very 2020:

It’s enough to make a brewski aficionado weep while sudsy hops are poured down the sink. An enormous amount of beer is going to waste in Winnipeg thanks to some bars and pubs being forced to close due to the coronavirus pandemic. Other establishments operating at reduced capacity are also having to dump hundreds of gallons down the drain…

I love the first sentence. If you hate sudsy and brewski, then you at least have to admire the proper use of aficionado.

Anyway, finally and speaking of which… perhaps… no, not really… there were comments made after the announcement of the NAGBJ awards… what’s that?… oh, it’s back to a “w”… BAGNW… is that it? Anyway, my comments were limited to “Third?!?!” and “Third?!?!” given I was mystified at certain outcomes. But I used to judge these things as part of panels, too, and I know that there are limits and these limits are realities. As I have noted before, these quibbles mainly hover around process and in particular nominations being from the authors and/or publishers. It would be easy enough to just send all members ballots rather than the filtering function of judging panels. They are also limited in audience as many folk don’t need or care about awards, especially once an “award-winning” adjective is already allocated to the bio.* Yet:

I just want people to know it’s totally normal, okay, and valid to wish for recognition and acknowledgement of a job well done. I don’t write about the things I write about because I NEED those things, but darn if it doesn’t feel good when it happens.

Boom! As with all the medals, I presume it is a stepping stone for the aspiring – which is good and normal and to be encouraged. And a small reward in a field without much recognition.

But, unlike during the years of my own experience, concerns and even unfair slags were raised about it all being too GBH focused or even bad back scratchy.  In homage to 1830s British Parliamentary politics, lobbying continues for the establishment and the reformers. While many entries or entrants have appeared on that bloggy space’s webby pages… well, what is wrong with that?  Especially as other outlets have been disappearing for years? Small pond. That’s where we swim. I do say that while acknowledging (having sifted through it all week after week now for years) I think there is a sort of beer trade writing of a sort not only is a bit samey and a bit goal oriented or even formulaic (the last paragraph often seems written first, as it were) but still a sort which may attract praise within a circle of co-aspirants. Well? So what!?! Why be a grump in all things? It’s just, yes, light entertainment – and we have to remember that much beer writing is actually very good, including, yes, even at GBH.** Perhaps not as much as they would say… but, in the end, Beth did entirely the proper thing and set the record straight in vivid technicolour. Go Team Beth.***

That’s a lot. I’m done. As always, remember there’s more out there. Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays (this week Jordan touts discount ham!!!) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword. And remember BeerEdge, too.

*No one cares about being “awards-winning” do they?
**Let’s stick with very good, shall we. Superlatives are so… not superlative. Plus, I’m a Pellicle sort of person. 
***See the “*” here.