Category: Beer in the End Times

This Week’s Fantastically Even Dramatically Encouraging Beery News Notes For W3Oct25

Usually I have something to share at the outset. Something cheery. But as the garden is on its last legs, as the month slips toward Halloween and then we deal with the changing of the clocks, it seems that any pretense that the year isn’t beginning the final act is fading fast. But… but… before all that, there is one more bit of baseball. One of the most exciting ALCS runs ever now turns into the World Series between a startlingly strong Blue Jays against the defending Dodgers led by the semi-deity known as Mr. Ohtani.  Look at him!  He’s the perfect player. Kyusung Gong of the AP took it and it sums up Ohtani neatly. He barely looks like he’s putting in any effort. His batting is the same. Yet… the Jays look good. So, even though neither of the two are my team, I will be feet up this Friday evening for game one. If you have never watched baseball you may want to watch this. One more thing. The Jays celebrate with US beer brewed under license in Canada. Lordy:

The Toronto Blue Jays are sponsored by Labatt Brewing Company, the Canadian-headquartered brewery that represents big-name booze brands like Corona, Stella Artois, Palm Bay and, yes, Budweiser. That’s why, upon the win, you could see an icy barrel stocked to the brim with bottles and cans of Budweiser within an arm’s reach of every Blue Jays player at any given time.

As I say, not my team. Next, some beery news from the world of British fitba. First up, we have Jessica Mason’s report on the new brewery being build at second tier Wrexham, Wales care of those struggling team owners Reynolds and McElhenney:

Since the duo bought Wrexham AFC five years ago, the club has risen up the ranks from the non-league to England’s second tier. Added to this, the brand has also found fame via a Disney+ documentary Welcome to Wrexham, which followed the club’s story and focused global attention on the area, also boosting tourist numbers. Then, last year, Reynolds and McElhenney acquired a majority stake in local brewery Wrexham Lager…. now there are plans afoot for other drinks brands, including Wrexham Lager to have a boosted presence with the proximity of the new brewery being developed nearby. The application reads: ‘The Wrexham Lager proposals, consisting a brewery and associated taproom and museum, will utilise existing buildings on the site.’

But then we read of the news out of England’s seventh tier as reported by Phil Hay of the newsletter, The Athletic FC:

The club were Bracknell Town, based 35 miles to the west of London. Their video drew attention because in it, their coach — the recently-appointed Matt Saunders — hammered a number of his senior players, criticising their conditioning, their attitude and their tendency towards alcohol. “I’m not going to let this football club be dragged down by people that can’t run, can’t look after their body, want to go and drink after games,” he said. “It ain’t happening.” Bracknell are having a time of it. They’re bottom of the Southern League Premier South with six points from 11 matches, and Saunders’ arrival hasn’t picked them up. 

Difference? Maybe five tiers? Boak and Bailey have also made a call via an alert on Patreon, asking for a boost to the next level:*

It’s been a while since we tackled a big question like where did lager louts come from, what’s the deal with nitrokeg beers or when did video games in pubs become a thing? We’ve got an idea to write something about The Prospect of Whitby but beyond that, what are some other questions we might tackle? We like to add the sum of collective knowledge – to pull facts together into one place where they can be found. Suggestions welcome.

In a time when some other voices have gone a bit silent or seem a little discouraged, this reminder of the need to add to the sum of collective knowledge is encouraging. Solidarity friends! Send then your ideas or even scribble your own somewhere and let us know. Similarly, The Pellicle feature this week is by Lily Waite-Marsden, a portrait of Macintosh Ales of London which, at the outset, does not offer an initial encouraging prospect:

There’s a small yard a moment away from Stoke Newington Church Street in North East London. At its entrance an entirely perfunctory and heavily battered railing protects the square of overgrown cobbles from the pavement beyond. On the first floor of the old stable buildings on three sides, four green doors lead to nothing but a 10-foot drop; the yard is hemmed with various shades of green paint—faded and flaking patchwork grass, darker, glossier army-surplus vehicle paint. But for a hand-painted sign and a number of planters giving the game away, passing on a quiet morning or late at night it might look a little tired, unloved.

But then… it was encouraging. And, turning to brewing history, Andreas Krennmair wrote about a favourite topic of mine, Schenkbier. Except when I looked at the stuff it was from the perspective of what was brewed by German speaking immigrants to the USA. Schenk was referenced regularly descriptions of the brewing trade in the third quarter of the 1800s and was described as one of three species of German beer which had crossed the ocean: lager, bock and schenk.  Andreas found some information from a few decadeds earlier that helped him unpack what was in the glass:

What’s surprising is how different the beers were in terms of original gravity and attenuation. OGs between 11 and 12.6 °P are absolutely solid, and while some of these beers didn’t have nearly as much alcohol as modern lager beers, they’d still be alright to drink, although probably on sweeter side for modern tastes. Especially the beer from Heller stands out, with a respectable 11.5 °P but only 2.9% ABV and a very high residual extract. Doing the calculation, the real attenuation was less than 40%, so this beer must have been a sweet mess. Compare this with modern lager beer, with real attenuation around 65%.

Perhaps syrupy low kick gak is the next big thing. It could be already. There is going to be a next big thing, right? Maybe not. North America’s oldest brewer, Molson, is laying off staff. And not just any staff – the white collar staff of MCBC:

Beer maker Molson Coors Beverage Company said on Monday it would cut about 400 jobs, or nine per cent of its salaried workforce in the Americas by year end as part of a corporate restructuring plan. The company’s Americas workforce consists of employees in the U.S., Canada and certain countries in Latin America. A spokesperson for the company told CBC News in an email that the restructuring “only applies to salaried non-union employees across the Americas.” The company is not providing a breakdown by country or province at this stage, and no offices or breweries will shut down as part of the restructuring, the spokesperson added.

It’s always the suits who suffer. The trends in beer are not comforting. Last week’s noting that craft might need saving** not only got some chatter going but I played Mr Smil and dipped my toe into the math that we are living with seeking to compare those apples to apples:

Interesting to note that 2024, Athletic NA beer alone was 400,000 bbl. Is NA beer a comparable to other booze? Is it booze? We should probably compare alcohol sector to alcohol sector. Take just that one brewery’s production out, the drop is more like 14%…  Worse news if we believe Beer Marketers Insights (Oct 1): “Craft beer trends (ex non-alc) steepened over the summer to volume -8.4% and $$ -6.4%; several pts below total beer volume -5.6% and $$ down 5.1% for 18 wks thru Sep 20 vs yr ago.” So 2019-24 at -14% (non-NA) could be down -20% for 2019-25.

Or more *** The Guardian wrote about another aspect of the retraction from alcohol – the loss of a cornerstone element of overall profitability for restaurants:

The industry standard markup on alcohol in a high-end restaurant is anywhere from 150% upwards, making it one of, perhaps the only, high-margin products on the menu. As people drink less, it could leave restaurants in a precarious position. For every restaurateur willing to go on the record to discuss the shifting tide, there were an equal number who refused to be interviewed for this story. Some because they say they’ve witnessed no change in customer behaviour, and others because the subject matter is at odds with promoting a hospitality business. While it doesn’t necessarily do wonders for the bottom line, diners drinking less at the table does create a more harmonious environment for restaurant workers. Fewer drunk bodies means less risk overall.

Me, I usually just have water but still try to tip like I’ve had a bit of booze. Where will this all lead?  What can be relied upon to get the attention of the public. Innovation? The Beer Nut himself spent last weekend in Warsaw and spotted one of the more innovative cultural expressions of beer culture – a sausage randall as illustrated in thumbnail format… in consideration of some of your delicate constitutions. Much consternation was found in the comments which followed his Bluesky post – but I really can’t see the difference between a lager washed through sausages and sausages washed down with lager. Much depending of course on the quality of the sausage.

Speaking of quality, Matty C. has written about the return of Boddingtons for CAMRA’s What’s Brewing and has placed it in the moment:

Being honest for a second, this beer is not reinventing the wheel – there are far more interesting and flavourful pints available, even from JW Lees itself. But I consider the resurgence of Boddingtons is about more than flavour. Reports are already coming in from Manchester venues that are not able to keep up with demand, turning away disappointed drinkers who want to be seen with a pint of it in hand. This is significant, because those who are drinking it are young, fashionable, and about as far away from the cask beer stereotype as you can possibly get. This can only be considered a positive. For many drinkers, especially younger ones, a row of handpulls featuring a range of products they’ve never heard of can be incredibly intimidating. In Boddingtons, a brand has been revived that people can easily trust.

Heritage as maybe heritage? Maybe. Speaking of maybe, there is always the potential for maybe not – as one liquor dome in Northern Ireland found out recently:

Planners order the business to remove shipping containers used as a bar and storage, as well as a takeaway food cabin with a serving hatch on a Skipper Street – a side road that runs past the beer garden. Also to go are steel boundaries with wood covering that include an access gate and windows, an enclosed walkway entrance, a “tent structure”, boundary fencing in excess of two metres in height not adjacent to a road, and storage areas for bins and beer kegs. City planners say they’ve reached their verdict as “it appears there has been a breach of planning control” on the site.

Finally and probably relatedly, here is an interesting snippet of an unlocked article from the Financial Times written by Charles Spencer (Princess Di’s brother) on the question of authenticity which includes this:

When, in 1992, I inherited Althorp, my family’s ancestral home, I felt a responsibility to return it to how it had been for much of its 500-year history. For, over the previous decade and a half, the interior had been lavishly redecorated by my stepmother, Raine, whose taste and palette were inherited from her flamboyant mother, romantic novelist Barbara Cartland… I turned to John Cornforth, perhaps the leading British architectural historian of the time, to help me return things to how they should be. We toured Althorp’s principal rooms, assessing them for Raine damage. Cornforth’s kind reassurances dwindled as we went. Finally, on entering the South Drawing Room — a cacophony of clashing pinks (on the walls, on the floor, in the curtains) — Cornforth rocked back in his tightly drawn lace-ups. “Goodness,” he mused. “I really can’t help you here .  As he departed Althorp that afternoon, he lobbed me a catch-all mantra that he hoped might help: “Good taste is authenticity — and authenticity is good taste.”

The point is excellently made. But what does this have to do with beer? Only on the idea of how his hunt for authenticity based on that saying became for Spencer a no-doubt very expensive exercise in conformity. Realizing that, he argues for a balance between respect for what has come before with a realization that you need to live in the present, too. Can we compare the return of Boddingtons or the sweet mess that was historic schenk or that sausage randall with the clashing pinks of a devotee Barbara Cartland’s fashion sense?  Obviously even the “don’t yuk their yum” level of junior beer expert might balk at the more garish, the most lurid of these pleasures. But where to draw the line?

While we consider that over the week ahead, please also check out, Boak and Bailey on this and every Saturday and then sign up for their entertaining footnotes, too. Look out for Stan when he feels the urge now that he’s retired from Monday slot… maybe … maybe not. Then listen to a few of that now newly refreshed 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 has been on hiatus since April but the archives are out there with the all the sweary Mary! There is new 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. That’s quite good and after a break they may well be are back every month!

*Formatted to fit, to protect the innocent perhaps but mainly to fit.
**Jeff updated his thoughts, by the way, but it did make me wonder why what one wants should be limited to what some producers feel they can provide. Perhaps the former suits of Molson now share that feeling.
***A bear of beer! 

The Beery News Notes For The Threat Of Frost And The Yanks And Jays In What Might Just Be A Post-Passion World

Well, since we last met… yes, fine… the Red Sox lost last Thursday. But then the Yankees (who beat the Sox… my Sox) got their own butts kicked in the first two games of the next series by the Jays who took it all in game four last night which… sorta made me feel… schadenfreudig? Is that the word? I dunno. Or is it dünno? Anyway, the other word on my mind is frost. I will only know at sunrise this Thursday morning if the sheets and covers that I threw over the tomatoes and basil and beans did the job. (Update: -0.3C at 6 am!) But it is autumn. And it doesn’t matter if there is no frost for the two weeks after today if the frost came today. Most years, with luck, I can coax something or another to keep on growing right up to November. With luck.

Speaking of words, on Tuesday Jeff wrote about the doom and gloom in the beer trade, reviving some thoughts from 2013 as he did – a discussion in one way about perceptions that the choice of words convey as much as the context. The context being if one is on the way up or the way down. This week’s news notes seem to carry a bit of the weight of those sorts of perceptions so I feel like this sort of preamble is needed to remind ourselves that it’s just the point in time we find ourselves in. We need to reflect. To consider our lot. Sorta how I feel when I look at the black leaves of a tomato patch after a killing frost. When I reflect. And swear a little. So I will perhaps a bit intentionally mix the bad news with some things that are lighter and see what happens. Good thing there’s plenty to read.

First, about that cyberattack* in Japan on Asahi that I mentioned last week. It seems that it has been resolved but I hadn’t appreciated how it create quite serious issues for the broader Japanese bevvy and snacking market:

Most of the Asahi Group’s factories in Japan were brought to a standstill after the attack hit its ordering and delivering systems on Monday. Major Japanese retailers, including 7-Eleven and FamilyMart, have now warned customers to expect shortages of Asahi products… Asahi is the biggest brewer in Japan, but it also makes soft drinks and food products, as well as supplying own-brand goods to other retailers… In its latest statement, Asahi said that as a result of containment measures following the attack, ordering and shipment systems in Japan had been affected and it was also unable to receive emails from external sources.

Speaking of containment, consider Mr. Gladman on two types of entryways to basement bars and how their architecture guides the experience:

The street-steps-door type of basement bar usually has windows somewhere on its street-facing wall and so maintains a connection to the city outside (Type A Basement Bar in the Gladman Taxonomy of Bars…)  Bars like this can be hard to find even if you know about them… It’s a tiny adventure that ends with a delicious reward. These bars are often unpretentious and cosy — everyone is hunkered down together, hidden away in a prime spot, unnoticed by the schmoes passing by just a few feet above. The other, street-door-steps type of basement bar (Type B) is even more concealed at street level, often offering just a small sign above a door. Within this lurks a clipboard-wielding, radio-headset-wearing guardian, like Cerberus at the gates to a boozy underworld. Once you’re in, it’s often entirely devoid of natural light. It is its own world, womb-like and all encompassing.

Not so many people walking down these sorts of steps in Brazil – both Type A and B – which is reasonable given the news:

…the market has a new worry: the crisis caused by contamination of distilled beverages with methanol. For now, it’s not possible to determine the impact of this on the beer industry going forward. On the one hand, bars are emptier and parties have been canceled due to the negative repercussions of the contamination. On the other hand, greater consumer concern about cocktails has led to a strong shift toward beer, seen as safer.

My dive bar tourist trip to Rio is now officially cancelled. But more weclome might be a stop at The Dog and Bell in Deptford, London which is the subject of this week’s feature in Pellicle penned… or perhaps rather keyboard clicked by Will Hawkes:

This backstreet boozer in a historically unglamorous part of town has not only survived the pub cull of the past few decades, it has thrived. Indeed, few London pubs are currently more fashionable. How? Well, for all the Dog and Bell’s singularity, its story tracks the evolution of pubs in modern London from the 1970s, when they were ubiquitous, to now, our frantic, distracting era of Instagram Guinness and event culture, when a simple pint in the pub is no longer good enough reason to get off the sofa. It’s been a long journey, but at every key junction over the past 50 years this charismatic pub has taken the right turn. 

A loving portrait of a welcome local and perhaps unexpected gem. Conversely, I don’t expect to be following in the footsteps of  Jason Wilson who brought an extreme level of exactitude to the consideration of an extremely expensive beverage – coffee that costs $30,000 a kilo:

Each sip I tried—and we were served small sips because of the limited amount of this coffee—had its own personality. Each producer and variety had a different flavor profile, mouthfeel, aroma, even color. While some may regard coffee tastings like this one as snobby or ridiculous, I appreciate the intense mindfulness and attention to detail coffee fanatics have. In one sip of coffee, there are flowers, fruits, foods, and even songs. I tried each of them for myself, then read the judge descriptions from the Best of Panama auction to compare thoughts. Some may disagree, but I try to treat it as if there is no right and wrong, just opinions.

And, speaking of opinions, Boak and Bailey posted a bit of a questionaire on the status of Belgian beer culture, asking folk for their thoughts about whether the beers and pubs they encountered on a recent trip were (my words) out of date duds or treasures at risk:

There’s also something about how the beers we tried on this recent trip didn’t seem to have evolved from Belgian brewing tradition so much as they were inspired directly by American-led homebrewing culture. It’s really weird to drink a Belgian-brewed saison and think, huh, this tastes like one of those ‘farmhouse IPAs’ people were making back home in about 2012. When we think of newer Belgian breweries we do like, it’s because they’ve found a way to push the parameters while still producing beer that tastes and feels Belgian.

This generous sort of the asking of the questions is a very useful tool of one is wanting to advance one’s education. Seek the views of others to check your own assumptions. Among the responses, the particularly well-placed Eoghan provided a lot of insight from the local point of view:

I don’t disagree that Belgium has one of the richest and most diverse beer cultures in Europe, and it is a small miracle that so many idiosyncratic beer traditions managed to survive the tumultuous 20th century – more tumultuous here in Belgium than they maybe allow for. But it was their proposition that Belgian beer culture is defined by evolution not revolution that prompted my little piece of anachronistic time travel above. It is true that Belgian brewers – to borrow an idea I first stole from fellow Belgophile Joe Stange – are past masters at co-opting and finetuning wider brewing trends to make them palatable in Belgium. My contention is, however, that the history of Belgian beer is more of a Hegelian dialectic, a process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis evidenced less by evolution that by periods of stability punctuated by significant, discombobulating ruptures.

See, that is great. Fascinating – and I don’t even know what half of that up there means! Another thing I don’t know is whether a Spanish beer brewed in Britian in a British brewery owned by a Spanish brewing firm is Spanish or not:

This week Damm will make its first meaningful manufacturing foray outside Iberia when it opens a brewery in Bedford. The move represents an investment of almost €100 million (£87 million) and will create scores of jobs. The company is going to great lengths to ensure its UK-brewed beers taste the same as those made in Barcelona by sticking to the original recipe and investing in the equipment to ensure the product is identical.

Hmm… I still don’t know. But if we are sticking with the examination of not only how things became what that are but also what are these things in themselves, there is no better assessor than The Beer Nut who wrote about the recent final edition of the annual Borefts beerfest:

Two brewery stands at the 2025 Borefts Beer Festival seemed to have almost continuous queues. One of them I could understand: the New England legend Hill Farmstead. Early on day one I tried the barrel-aged coffee porter they brought, The Birth of Tragedy… This isn’t the sort of beer I associate with Hill Farmstead but it has been created with the same level of expertise. Canadian brewery Badlands was next to them and was, if anything, even more popular with the crowds. I had never heard of them so had no idea what the fuss was about. After they sold out and closed up early on the first day, I made sure to be there early on the second… [After trying two of their beers…] I was none the wiser regarding the Badlands fuss. They didn’t seem to be doing things particularly different to a thousand other microbreweries..

So, there you have both broader analysis of the cultures of beer as well as specific examination of each beer, drip by drip in the common context of the fest. All cheery and interesting exercises in digging around and thinking about beer. David Jesudason dug into another chestnut for the Wine & Spirit Education Trust, unpacking what’s called IPA but what he calls “IPA”:

The first ‘IPAs’ – note quotation marks – were sent out on East India Company boats in the 1760s and were strong, highly hopped ales due to India’s warm climate: the hops’ antimicrobial properties combined with the high alcohol level aimed to prevent spoilage. These were a cross between a bitter and a barleywine and by the time they arrived in India the hop character had vanished into the Bay of Bengal. They were said to taste more like champagne than beer. In reality, they were a world away from a modern IPA. Samuel Allsopp was the first to market them as Indian Pale Ales – and tie them to colonial decadence – after he copied Londoner George Hodgson’s recipe but crucially brewed them in Burton, where the minerals in the water further emphasized the beer’s hop character. These were bitter British ales or similar to heavily hopped autumn stock beers.

And Laura Hadland took on a task that I wish more writers who focus on beer attempt – discussing wine:

The lights were low for a chic soiree organised by Wines of Hungary at Vagabond Wines in Birmingham yesterday. Twenty five producers were showcasing their wines to an enthused audience of trade, media and more. I had an hour to work my way round the hit list that I had prepared in advance – nowhere near enough time. Especially since the winemakers and their sales teams were so enthusiastic about their wares that they all insisted on having us try every single one.

My experience of Hungarian wine started with some pretty hefty even harsh Bulls Blood out by the town’s water resevoir in high school but I now hoard sweet Tokaji which I never seem to get around to opening as fast as I find them. Of course, that means my wake might be worth the trip as my fam gives them away along with my record collection.

ATJ shared more serious thoughts on mortality in his piece “Funeral Pints” where the swirling thoughts at a time of loss were steadied with gratitude by a bracing pint among others in a pub:

The clunk of loose change as it goes into a pitcher, ‘thank you very much William’, ‘not a problem’, a stooped man with a face that reminds me of a thinner version of WC Fields.’ ‘Here he is.’ ‘He ain’t got a jacket.’ ‘What’s it to you,’ comes the reply. ‘He was dressed up as a boy scout yesterday,’ says another voice. The man with the long face who photographed his breakfast is having a talk with himself, while elsewhere pints are piling up on tables. Tattoos, chewing, chomping, swallowing, gulping, laughing, ‘listen mate’, finger pointed without malice. We’d better get to the funeral.

The drink finds a place in so many moments. And does the job. Even now at a time which we are subject to so much that feels like wave upon wave of a grim big picture, like this data* from Beer Marketers’ Insights:

Craft beer trends (ex non-alc) steepened over the summer to volume -8.4% and $$ -6.4%; several pts below total beer volume -5.6% and $$ down 5.1% for 18 wks thru Sep 20 vs yr ago. And when comparing craft’s yr-to-date sales thru Sep 20 vs the same period in 2023, the # of craft vendors (-10%), sub-brands (-13%) and SKUs (-12.5%) are all down double digits.**

From that view of the general, for the double, Jeff also wrote on a specific application in his obit* of Upright, a favourite brewery facing its end:

Craft brewing has spent a huge amount of time navel-gazing over what it means to have a clear vision. This often bled into marketing bromides, as breweries repackaged derivative products as original and creative. That development led to some of the cynicism that marks the mood today. Upright did have a clear vision, however—and Alex seemed almost immune to commercial considerations. Upright always felt more like a sixth-generation Belgian or Franconian brewery than an American craft brewery to me.

A wonderful remembrance of the soon to be no more. Summing up based on all the above, can we draw conclusions? Well we could ask ourselves (yet again*) whether the function of good beer writing to support the industry or to more broadly understand the trade and culture. By way of illustration, consider this:

“…The Guild’s board members are all driven by our shared passion for the beer industry and those who work within it. We’re proud to represent the very best of beer and cider communicators, who are such an important asset to the wider industry…”

A familiar line that’s become cliché and so nothing against the particular speaker. A prominant popular theme voiced for the best part of two decades, perhaps until somewhat recently. I mention that in the context of this article in The New York Times which is, yes, yet another obit* for US craft beer but, perhaps unusually, one that contains some interesting admissions:

This summer, 21st Amendment believed it had found a way to keep at least some of its operations going. It planned to bring in a new partner and start buying smaller craft beer brands that it would brew in San Leandro. But in late August, the lender pulled the plug on that idea. In late September, 21st Amendment closed its flagship brewpub in San Francisco. The San Leandro location is expected to shutter by the end of this month. “We were driven by our passion for craft brewing, and we got so caught up in it that we had blinders around what the reality is for craft brewing right now,” said Shaun O’Sullivan, a co-founder of 21st Amendment. “We’re a cautionary tale right now to anybody who wants to grind down and open up their own place. It’s just not a good time.”

So is / was “passion” an “important asset” or a form of those “blinders“? Whether in business or in writing. Maybe both. What ever happened to well-earned hard-bitten steely-eyed objectivity? Why did we not foresee, just as the rise casinos and later lotto tickets stripped gambling of its vice, how craft beer was infantalizing booze with kiddie friendly fruit flavours in brightly coloured cans – and even converting every tavern into potential seminar spaces.*** I blame the “don’t judge the tastes of others” line. Who writes without hoping to offer incisive opinion? You know, if the beer writers, by error or omission, participated in priming the passion pump with boosterisms during the era of irrational exhuberence… is it not reasonable to consider that the oeuvre itself aided in the downturn to some degree?****  That’s sorta summed up by that old nugget, the one about the rising tide raising all boats that we heard so much about. We also know that the tide falls. Twice a day. Every day. But most folk forgot* to mention that.*****

Doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t learn lessons from the downturn. We might even consider ourselves now “post-passion” in our relation to beer and beer writing. That would be good. Without, you know, sponsored articles or A.I. articles****** or even A.I. sponsored A.I. articles.* That would be better. Based on the above we can see people can and will doubledown and keep digging around, questioning conventions and asking the right questions about what is and what isn’t the good stuff in all this beery culture.******* I’m sure we can. Well, you all can. I just read this stuff.

That’s a lot. And there’s still the footnotes below. While you are chewing on all this, please also check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and sign up for their entertaining footnotes, too. Look out for Stan when he feels the urge now that he’s retired from Monday slot… maybe … maybe not. Then listen to a few of that now newly refreshed 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 has been on hiatus since April but the archives are out there with the all the sweary Mary! There is new 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. That’s quite good and after a break they may well be are back every month! Such is life. Such is beer podcasting and newslettering… which, as Ray says, are blogs! And he’s right.

*YIKES!!!
**At least it’s not as bad as in Russia: “In the first half of 2025, retail beer sales in Russia fell by 16.3 percent year-on-year… Due to the increase in excise taxes (they increased by 15.4 percent at the beginning of the year), the cost increased accordingly. In 2023, the average price per liter of beer was 120 rubles, in 2024 — 129 rubles, and at the end of July 2025 it reached 151 rubles per liter — prices have increased by more than a quarter (26 percent) since 2023, Nielsen added.“
***The signs outside the craft beer bars said “Off-flavour Seminars Every Tuesday!” I thought of that when reading this passage from “The Engines and Empires of New York City Gambling”by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, August 4,  2025: “Gambling, too, now divides the world between those who know enough to make it boring and those who—bored—prefer not to know. They play and lose anyway. Thrilling games, like thrilling cities, thrive on enigmatic imperfections: the small market anomalies that quants scour for an edge, the tells and giveaways that reward the observant and elude the rest. Once all is understood, all is dull. Gambling may once have belonged to the Devil, but I assure you it does no longer. The arrival of organized gambling in its casino form has stripped away even the faded glamour of old miscreants like Rothstein and St. Clair. When, at last, detailed renderings of the proposed Caesars Palace emerged, they were hilariously decorous, showing not crowds of modern Harry the Horses and Nathan Detroits but elegantly dressed men and women in dignified black, playing in poker rooms that looked ready to host a seminar.“
****And to be sure we can also lay much at the door of the evangelizing homogenizing craft industry conference seminars which took a page from time share symposiums. Imperial Pilsner anyone? Everyone?
*****Did I ever mention I spent school years right into undergrad next to the Bay of Fundy? Nevermind. Perhaps now’s the time for the trade’s comms people to adopt of the “Big Yellow Taxi” message – “drink craft: you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” It could work. Something might.
******Can’t wait for that market sector‘s crash! It’s all relative.
*******BTW there was some great beer writing advice set out in last Saturday’s footnotes from B+B: “Prop Up The Bar is a new blog to us. It’s a proper old-fashioned blog, full of massive photos that haven’t been edited and typos. It’s made us think again that the professionalisation of blogging arguably didn’t do it any favours and has perhaps discouraged people from just having a go, like Nick C, using their blog as a diary. In that context, props are due to Martin Taylor whose blog is well written and well researched, but never feels as if it’s taking itself massively seriously. (Yes, we know, we should watch and learn.) It signals that, actually, you can just have adventures and quickly write them up.“

Your Beery News Notes For The End Of July And The Beginning Of The Back To School Ads

The last day of July. It’s one of the first endings of the year. Well, there is the end of winter but no one regrets that. And the switch from late spring to early summer never really leaves a ripple. But… July. Spent the other evening watching dusk arrive at a nearby conservation area, listening for bobolinks and kingbirds as they snabbed a few last bugs out over the field. Saw a raven. Heard it croak.  Mr. Nature. That’s me. Five Saturdays to Labour Day. But even that date’s lost its sting as it’s the first September that not one kid is in the public school system for twenty-three years. What milestone is left? Last day of July.

First up, David J. announced the roundup for the July edition of The Session with a pretty interesting set of submissions this month, interruping his reguarly scheduled broadcasting:

Today’s Substack is ‘free to air’ – like Test cricket and Premier League football should be – so that the people who have contributed can gain the widest readership possible. (Also a desi publican I was going to interview suffered a bad injury and had to postpone. He’s fine, though, and I’ll be bringing his story soon.) On July 11, I asked various participants to write a blog, web post, newsletter (like this one) or even a SM thread on the subject of food in pubs. I’ve rounded up their work and at the bottom have written about the dangers of being a go-to voice on pub food.

Go have a look. Plenty of good reading. Also well worth a read, Ruvani de Silva has announced the launch of her course hosted by CAMRA on American Heirloom Cider Apples and it is good to see the historical context at the forefront:

Settlers, noticing the tribes’ bountiful orchards and the quality of the land they were cultivating on, were keen to claim it for themselves, unafraid to use violent displacement to do so. In one particularly horrific example, future President George Washington took a break from fighting the British in 1779 to send Generals Clinton and Sullivan to implement a scorched-earth policy across the Six Nations of the Iroquois’ beautiful, fertile Fingers Lake land in upstate New York, burning their flourishing orchards to the ground.

This lines up from some of what I found when researching upstate New York history over a decade ago including Lord Selkirk’s 1803 description of apple orchards around Geneva NY from before the Sullivan raids as well as this description from 1797:

…a person from Scotland has established, at Geneva, a very respectable brewery, which promises to destroy in the neighbourhood, the baneful use of spirituous liquors. The apple and peach orchards, left by the Indians, yield every year abundance of fruit, for the use of the inhabitants, besides making considerable cyder; so much so, that one farmer near Geneva sold cyder, this year, to the amount of one thousand two hundred dollars.*

Speaking of solid research, after last Saturday’s news update was posted by Boak and Bailey, I rushed to their footnotes at Patreon which included this tidbit:

…we’re entering the era of ‘normalism’. People want to drink normal beer, in normal pubs or bars, while eating normal food, and wearing normal clothes… Perhaps because they don’t have the headspace to cultivate less mainstream tastes, or maybe because standing out as an individual feels like a dangerous business in 2025. Or just pointless. We keep seeing young couples dressed head to toe in formless matching beige. 

I thought of that Monday evening when I saw a young man waiting for the lights to change, standing at an intersection in beige Sperry Top Sider clones. They had to be clones, right? I also thought of this when I read Jessica Mason‘s news about the recent rise  in Heineken’s fortunes:

Speaking about the results, Heineken CEO and chairman Dolf van den Brink said: “In the first half, we delivered solid results as organic operating profit grew 7.4% as the operating margin expanded by 26 bps and net revenue increased 2.1%…” Highlighting the strides the business has made, van den Brink pointed out how Heineken’s “volume performance improved across all regions in the second quarter and continued to be of high quality…  Describing how the company has achieved this, van den Brink explained: “Our advantaged geographical footprint helped us to adapt to ongoing macro-economic challenges which impacted consumer sentiment and expenditures.**

Is that so bad? Perhaps green is as much the new beige as beige is. Normal. Makes more sense than spinning in your sheets over and over thinking of all the coulda woulda shouldas. The trend is evident in the US craft scene as summarized by Keith Gribbins at Craft Brewing Business the other day:

The Brewers Association’s 2025 Midyear Report shows an industry still facing strong headwinds. Yet, pockets of growth remain — especially for the smallest on-site brewers. As of June 2025, 9,269 craft breweries were operating in the U.S. — down 1% from a year ago. Closures continue to outpace openings, led by a 3% decline in microbreweries. Taprooms dipped 1%, while brewpub and regional brewery counts remained flat. Craft beer volume also shrank. The BA estimates a 5% year-over-year decline in production. 

Five percent cut in production in the last 12 months is not a “maturing” or any sort of “sideways” something. As one would say in my youth, the arse is out of it. Doug Veliky shared some thoughts about where those buyer might be heading and why the trip isn’t that difficult:

Low-dose THC beverages offer the same qualities that have made light beers, spritzes, and canned cocktails so popular. They are social, easy to enjoy, and deliver a consistent experience every time. Because these drinks are made to be consumed more than once in a sitting, they help establish rituals that lead to frequent, repeat purchases. Instead of being one-and-done, the format allows consumers to stack their way toward their preferred level of buzz.

So, craft may have lost its hook. By which I mean that idea of the ritual habitual. People are still doing things, sure. They’re just not doing those things because they now have the option to do these other things. Or is that the new habit? Being what B+B call normal. It might actually just mean not needlessly complex. Manufactured difficulty. Life’s hard enough without made up difficulties.

Note: not only do the top 40 breweries in the world not include much that can be called craft, onely one and a half seem to be American.

By way of comparison but really only as juxtaposition, Jeff continued his explorations into what makes a saison a saison, following up on his article on the style in Craft Beer & Brewing, illustrating once again that blogging about beer is always superior to the store bought stuff. I particularly liked how he moved the discussion from the romantic (ie lazy / fibby) explanation that saison is “something you feel” to getting to the elements of they stuff including the importance of a coarseness of character to the grains, as decoratively mentioned by Alex Ganum of Upright Brewing of Portland, Oregon:

Not sure if I ever shared this story, but back when we were running Old Salt, our hog rancher kept bugging me about using his triticale, which was the animal feed. He grew it himself and was proud of the quality, but I dismissed it early on thinking, ‘How good can animal feed be? ‘Well, that was dumb, because he eventually just dropped off a bag and it turned out to be incredible (which probably explained part of why his pork was delicious). So we asked him for a pallet and worked it into the Five for about a year or so.

Sixteen years ago, when I had the time to do so, when the kids were little enough that they couldn’t get too far, I grappled with the idea of these sorts of beers and their cousins, back when I could take a Saturday to contemplate such things in the shed. But that right there is as good an explanation as ever I’ve seen: beer made from bits fit for the livestock. Farm yard as much as farm house. Normal may not have time for farm yard.

Speaking of simple pleasures, Katie shared a lovely bit of recollection, a remembrance of Wetherspoons past involving herself and her staff access to discount chips:

When I worked at Wetherspoons many thousands of years ago, the one redeeming feature of the job other than the wage was access to a staff menu, off which we could also take a 50% staff discount. My favourite shift tea from this reduced selection of kitchen scraps was sausage and chips. It was not served with vegetables of any kind. A person can talk shit about Wetherspoons all day, and I will join in, but their chips have always been godly, the best of all the frozen chips. I am certain they are coated in semolina for extra crunch, leaving the centres fluffy and light. With mayonnaise, this dish, which cost me around £1.30 in 2008, was my favourite food. It didn’t make the pub I worked in any better, however. You can’t judge a pub by its chips—sometimes they are simply angels sent to soften the blow.

Normal likes chips and especially good discount chips. Quite right, too. Also alarmingly normal is Martin who has admitted to falling behind in his pub reporting and is trying to catch up which some of the highlights (*ahem*) of his continued touring:

Admit it, you’ve never heard of Cockerton, have you? Neither had I, even though this small Durham village is virtually contiguous (great word) with Darlington and only a few minutes from Piercebridge and my best-read blog post. And it’s got a free space for my campervan from which I can finish Durham’s Guide entries for another year. What Cockerton doesn’t appear to have is much actual character. though it does have excellent podiatry.

Note: at the Vytopna in Prague a little train set delivers your beer…

Finally and for the double, David Jesudason wrote the feature in Pellicle this week, the story of a thriving community pub at the edge of London that makes room for many and much:

Artist Neal Vaughan believes my snap judgment about Carshalton being a bit of a sleepy backwater is wrong. He explains how it’s a hub of creativity, which the Hope is at the centre of. Citing a memory from 2016, Neal recalls when Rodger encouraged him to set up Carshalton Artists’ Open Studios with all meetings and post-event drinks held in the pub. Tuesdays are described as a sacred weekday at the pub by Neal. It’s when folk musicians play an open session, board-game enthusiasts battle against each other at Scrabble, chess and Magic: The Gathering, and on occasion a leather maker taps away while seated on a chair. The pub even has a sailing crew that charters yachts, and when I visit they’re off for 10 days in the Adriatic.

There we are.  The end of trends, the end of a week’s news and the end of the month. It’s sorta normal. And as the sands trickle on down in your personal hourglasses, please check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday. Look out for Stan when he feels the urge now that he’s retired from Monday slot… maybe. Then listen to a few of the now rarely refreshed Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the (sometimes even but never) odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword is out there with the all the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer featuring visits to places like… Michigan! All About Beer has given space to some trade possy podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast with an episode three weeks ago!. And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good and after a break they are back every month! Such is life. Such is beer podcasting and newlettering… which, as Ray says, are blogs! And he’s right.

*See also History of Tioga, Chemung, Tompkins and Schuyler counties, New York. With illustrations and biographical sketches of some of its prominent men and pioneers at page 13: “The army was to march from their winter quarters on the Hudson to Wyoming; thence up the Susquehanna to Tioga, where another division, under General James Clinton, marching via Otsego Lake, after a diversion into the Onondagas country was to effect a junction, when the combined army, consisting of four brigades of infantry and riflemen, and a park of artillery, was to proceed through the valley of the Chemung; thence northward to Genesee River, destroying crops and houses and everything of value to the Indian as far as could be reached on either side of the trail of the army. The success of the expedition was most complete. Forty towns and more than 200,000 bushels of corn were destroyed, besides vast quantities of pumpkins, beans, melons, and other vegetables, and peach and apple orchards, and a most desolating march executed through the richest portion of the enemy’s country, with small loss to the invaders. Washington was afterwards called by the Indians Hano- dogarear, ” the town destroyer.”
**Oddly, The Independent reports Heineken has suffered losses in the first half of 2025. Who can you trust these days? Other than, you know, me.

Your Sum-Sum-Summah-time Beery News Notes For The Last Thursday Of June 2025

Who knew? See, I now do all those NYT puzzles now, along with my 6:37 am big black coffee, as I try to wake up my brain cells first thing in the morning. This was never my thing. Ever. Until I joined the Wordle covid coping crew. Yet there it is – a clever observation in a Connections solution this week. Those who head out and those who stick around are both the left. Leavers v. leavings. I suppose you knew that one. I spot some sneaky things in this life but miss plenty of the obvious. We all do, I suppose. Just not the same things. We are all framed by our own individual gaps. Which I was thinking about this week when I noticed something this week, bits of writing about writing. Not meta blogging. Just a few little observations. Like Phil Cook who wrote this comment on Boak and Bailey’s on them not spilling all the beans:

I’ve been fascinated by that piece. I guess I still don’t understand why you’d keep those concerns as subtext — or cover them at all, if you didn’t feel you could be more plain about them. The rise and fall of Fox Friday in Australia (rapidly expanding, slickly designed, all that) when the law finally caught up with their shady financier haunts me as a comparison. Lots of people got burned in that collapse. In that case, there wasn’t a Wikipedia page full of priors to point to that might encourage people to be more on guard. But when there is, why not highlight it?

My two cents is that their habit of keeping a few things back helps make their writing so good. A polite but informed reticence. It’s part of their tone that, frankly, keeps you connected as a reader. Conversely, have you ever get a PR email like I did this week – and you know they’ve never read your beer related website?  One that says…

We thought a roundup story of Canadian long weekend brew pairings could be of interest to your audiences…

Lordy. I never though I would have multiple audences. Sweet! Identify yourselves!! Their client will go unnamed. It’s not their fault. (See I can do it, too. I can be restrained.) Somewhat similarly and adopting a stream of consciousness fantasy futurist approach, Dave Infante thinks someone somewhere is willing to pay for a generic PR media campaign for draft beer because it worked for milk a few decades back:

…a cold glass of beer? Normal. Better than normal: aspirational. Colorful in the glass; dynamic with an effervescent head. Emphatically not weirdo sh*t. “Got Milk?” was brilliant because the dairy industry — the f*cking dairy industry — was able to harness the power of marketing to convince the American drinking public that milk — f*cking milk — was glamorous. That was a very deep hole to climb out of! And “Got Milk?” did it. With such a built-in advantage, don’t you think a beer-industry analogue boosting draft beer, which people already like, might be able to generate sales in addition to goodwill?

Lordy Lordy. Who’s paying for that? Not quite as unrestrained this week – yet perhaps also a tad wild eyed – was one Mr. Beeson on the beery business story of the splitting of the UK’s Signature Brew, they now putting the debt in one half and the assets in another to see if some part of the overall thing survives. He posted his story in The Grocer with a 23 June dateline, as he announced on BlueSky as an exclusive, which included a quote from co-founder of said division in progress, Tom Bott, that the “restructure allows us to finally put the challenges of the past behind us and focus on building the future we know Signature Brew is capable of…” mentioning the need to address the “legacy debt” – aka debt. But then on the very same day, Jessica Mason had her story on the same subject published in The Drinks Business:

Speaking exclusively to db about the ordeal that the company has faced to stay afloat, Bott explained: “This restructure allows us to finally put the challenges of the past behind us and focus on building the future we know Signature Brew is capable of. We have built a business that is profitable, resilient and unique, blending great beer with incredible live music experiences. By addressing legacy debt in a controlled way, we are…

Much of the quoted wording attributed to the same Mr. Bott in each story is identical to the other.* Now, we can’t find fault that part of the team guiding Bott and Co. through insolvency restructuring includes a PR / comms specialist who handed out very firm speaking points – but why give both Beeson and Mason the expectation that these were exclusive interviews when they simply were not? No need to leave that hanging implication.

But there is more. The beating that truth and good sense get even worse in this brave new world – as Lars found out this week:

I’ve been preparing for our upcoming holiday in Georgia, and was looking for beer places in Kutaisi. Georgia still has farmhouse brewing, but it’s not 100% clear where, so I was really excited to read this on a site about tourism in Georgia. So excited, in fact, I emailed a woman in Kutaisi who… wrote a bar guide. She’d never heard of it, and suggested it might be AI hallucinations. The moment I read that my doubts about this photo (that’s not a traditional Georgian cauldron) came back with full force. Looking at the page again I see that the whole thing is AI garbage… It’s depressing really. It used to be that you could be fooled by people deliberately lying to you, but now you can even be fooled by a bunch of numbers employed by lazy assholes. They’re not even trying to fool you, just randomly bullshitting.

Wow. Yet, if we reflect upon this, it is even less than bullshitting, too, as there is no intention behind the formation of the falsehood. No thinking mind. It’s less than a lie, less than even the PR fluff stuff we choke upon every week. It all reminded me of something Jordan wrote me a few weeks back:

Do you realize how lucky we were to get into the sweet spot of the internet with Ontario Beer? You couldn’t research it now. The AI has gummed up the works.

Truuf. There was a golden era but this ain’t it. Speaking of modernity induced head scratchers, this set of 1967 interviews on the introduction of drunk driving laws in the UK includes a few suprememly nut-so arguments:

The pedestrian could have too much to drink. He could cause an accident. He doesn’t get tested. It’s the driver who gets tested, and I think that’s unfair… For many many years, I’ve drove with far more liquor in me than I have now…

Would one name and shame now? Or just fondly remember: “… and right there – that’s your great aunt Peggy right there, son, after she came back from Africa and before she went to jail.” Personally, I may not have driven in Kenya or Uganda but I remember working with a guy in 1982-ish Nova Scotia who had cut a hole in the floor of his truck’s cab just below his steering wheel that let him drop the beer cans down to the road at the end of the work day. The past is a foreign land. Or is it?

Moving to the same sort of themes today, Reuters reports that it’s going to be yesterday once more for the US when it comes to the government’s recommendations for healthy drinking:

The U.S. government is expected to eliminate from its dietary guidelines the long-standing recommendation that adults limit alcohol consumption to one or two drinks per day, according to three sources familiar with the matter, in what could be a major win for an industry threatened by heightened scrutiny of alcohol’s health effects. The updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which could be released as early as this month, are expected to include a brief statement encouraging Americans to drink in moderation or limit alcohol intake due to associated health risks…

Is that so wrong? We may not have to concern ourselves with the counting of fingers and who’s wiser than who if the focus moves to the results rather than how many got you there. After all, no one argued that this or than number of ciggies or cheese burgers shorten your life… it was just confirmed that they did.

Speaking of science, I really liked this post by Jeff and the woodland secrets of yeasty studies by two brewers in Oregon including Ferment Brewing’s Dan Peterson:

…he started tinkering. He started by putting the microbes he collected in an incubator, and then growing up little colonies.

“Then, some of them you could start identifying like, yep, these are bacterial colonies, these are yeast colonies. And then there’s always mold at that point, trying cover everything. So as they’re growing, it’s a a race to get colonies [established] before the mold takes over. But once those are split up and on their own petri plates, they’re free of mold and completely isolated from each other.”

Speaking of yeast coated containers, Chimay is selling cans of the good stuff:

The Chimay Dorée, Rouge and Triple – ranging in alcohol content from 4.8% to 8% – are now available in 33cl cans. The heavier Bleue and Verte varieties will remain bottled for the time being. “You don’t drink those in just a few gulps,” said CEO Pierre-Louis Dhaeyer. The abbey has been developing the canned versions for over three years, and has already conducted initial market trials in the United States and Japan, where canned craft beer is far more common.

Can o’ Triple? Mmmm… refreshing. That’s not going to lead to any problems, no sir-ee!

And speaking of the fine arts, this week’s feature in Pellicle has many good paragraphs but this one by Robin Vliebergen in her piece “The Apples of Limburg”  is among the finest paragraphs on the drink I have read this year:

The older they are, the higher these trees grow, and therefore it becomes more difficult to pick their fruit. As their owners also grow older, this creates a very practical problem: the trees become too difficult for them to harvest. They are left with a glut of high-quality local apples, in need of young fit people to pick them. Reinier mentioned this problem to Bonne and Job, and so the first vintage of Cidre Sauvage was born.

Fabulous. The only tweek I might have added would be somehow weaving in “high quality on high limbs” but, as you know, I am a bit of a wag. And finally remember – speaking of waggery – this very weekend is the exact time to post your thoughts in response to Laura Hadland‘s question for The Session this month:

It doesn’t matter whether you have hosted a pub quiz, or just attended one. Or maybe you’re vaguely aware that pub quizzes exist, but you’ve made it your mission to steer clear. What is the best, most entertaining set of questions or challenges that can be posed to the punter? What single topic has engaged you the most? What is it that makes a great pub quiz stand out head and shoulders above the rest? What might tempt you into attending if trivia night is something you usually swerve?

I know what I’m going to say… but I’m not saying it yet! And it isn’t “name that smell!”  You. You should submit something. Do it? Tell your grandchildren when you are old that you did, too. They will be both flatout amazed and rippling with pride.

That’s it. I am settled in for summer now. Canada’s next week. Brace yourselves. In the meantime, please check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday. Look out for Stan as he is posting irregularly now that he’s retired from Monday slot. Then listen to a few of the now rarely refreshed Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the (sometimes even but never) odd Fridays with the new addition of his Desi Food Guide now on Tuesdays. And maybe The British Food History Podcast. Maybe? And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too, now relocated to her own website, Katie Mather Writes.  Ben’s monthly Beer and Badword is on its summer break but there’s plenty to catch up on! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer featuring visits to places like… Michigan! All About Beer has given space to some trade possy podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast with an episode just last month!. And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good but, hmm, they’ve also gone a bit quiet this year. The rest of these are largely dead. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  As has We Are Beer People. The Share looked to be back with a revival but now its gone quiet. And the Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. VinePair packed in Taplines as well. All dead and gone.  There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. Nope – that ended a year ago.   The Moon Under Water is gone – which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that – but only had the one post. Such is life. Such is beer podcasting and newlettering!

*Far more obvious than the big news in rice v. the big news in rice, right?

The Beery News Notes You Need To Get You Through Victoria Day Weekend

If we are honest, we should celebrate the Georges as much as Queen Victoria.* Sure she invented the fifth version of Canada but it was the Georgians who made us, they being the people (and, yes, their red clad dutiful doers) who kept us from being just another slice of Americana. Timely thoughts, you will agree. Some call this coming long weekend not Victoria Day but May Two Four – my greatest gift to Linguista Canadiana being the alt, May Too Far. When the Georgians were running the place, the birthday of the monarch was one of the greatest spectacles in the year as the account of 12 and, I suppose, 13 August 1827 at Guelph, Ontario on the celebration of the King’s birthday bears witness:

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

Always solid advice. By the way, the 200th anniversary of that event on the Guelph frontier is just two years and three months away. We need to recognize that boozy bicentennial! Time to apply for those government grant to celebreate our great heritage for celebration. I just hope the application form has a space for indicating the number of tiny tin cups required for the event. By the way, just seven years later, as explained up there in the Kingston Whig newpaper of 12 August 1834, not so much fun. None at all. But the advice still stands today: lay off the opium, buster.

Enough of then! What of the now? First up, Rebecca Crowe shared some of her love for her local, the The Little Taproom on Aigburth Road in Liverpool in Pellicle this week, a place of cheery activity and welcoming hosts, Si and Aggie:

If you’re in the Tap on a Wednesday night, you’ll be greeted by groups of people staring at their phones. However, this isn’t an unsociable act—it’s the Big Quiz in the Little Taproom. When you look around the regular teams, you see couples, groups, solo players, university-aged friends, alongside seasoned quiz addicts, and people just looking for some time out of the house. Si mentions how quickly the quiz has grown as a regular pub fixture. “At first, it was just a regular event to increase revenue on an otherwise relatively quiet Wednesday night,” he says, with his trademark full-hearted honesty.

Next, and perhaps quite conversely,  a bit of disappointing news for the efforts being undertaken to have cask ale and pubs recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO as explained in Pellicle by lobbying leader Jonny Garrett:

During brief discussions with the civil servant in charge of the project, I was told there would be a “relatively low bar of entry” to the national list, but that there was no intention to put any submissions to UNESCO for the first few years. The reasoning was that the government was not certain how to select which cultures should be submitted, but it also feels like they are reluctant to do so until they fully comprehend the implications for governance of any that make the grade.

Seems that as the UK is late to ratifying the underlying treaty, the government has to determine how to prioritize the many claims to being awarded the designation. So cask beer is up against things like all of Scotch Whisky (a good bet to beat out cask), Welsh mens’ choirs (obvs ahead of cask) and all those charming English fetes on the village green on lovely summer Saturdays that we see on TV, the ones  where half the upper middle class villagers who live there are murdered – and it was the church choir master, jilted by school teacher all those years ago, who was to blame after all!!

If, however, any evidence of the vibrant Life on Cask is required for  governmental purposes, the entirity of reportage from Martin is right there for the taking. Just this week he visited wrote about his recent trip to The Castle Hotel of Manchester providing us with a lovely photo essay – including this image of the entry way like something from one of those episodes of Time Team where they uncover a Roman mosaic in a farmer’s field. Heritage.

More bad news for the US booze and craft trade. BeerBoard reported that “total alcohol sales declined -7.3% year-over-year across same-store locations during the May 2–5 weekend” as Beer Marketer’s Insights shared:

Craft beer sales continue to soften in tracked retail channels thru first few wks of April. As total beer sales “improved” a bit to $$ down 2.2%, craft beer softened to $$ down 6.3% for latest 4 wks thru Apr 20 in Circana multi-outlet + convenience channels. Keep in mind, that’s excluding non-alc craft brands tracked in separate NA segment by Circana.

It’s interesting how heavily those still wishing on that star rely on non-alcohol beer stats to prop up the decline while also squeezing that Bourcard report** dismissing the demographics hard. If all the energy to ignore the trend was employed in addressing the trend… would the outcome change? Speaking of tinier trends, has anyone actually noticed the rise of Thai beer in America?

According to reports via The Manual, Group B USA has claimed to be the first and only Thai craft beer distributor in America and now it has also started brewing stateside too. Beer lovers and Thai cuisine connoisseurs have previously only been familiar with Singha and Chang beer brands, but in a deep dive interview with Group B CEO Bamee Prapavee Hematat there is now a growing Thai craft beer movement featuring IPAs and beers flavoured with dried bananas.

Despite all those Thai beers coming it, less is still more for the rest of the US beer trade, as Evan Rail reported in VinePair this week:

“That was the height of craft beer—it was easy to keep 28 handles on tap,” says Zak Rotello, the bar’s third-generation owner. “Now, fast-forward 10 years and I have less beer on tap than ever: 21 beers out of a total of 30 handles. The others are wine and spirits.” It’s not just Rockford. Across the country, a number of bar owners are moving away from the massive tap lists of the craft era. Back in the days of what Rotello calls “rotation nation,” enthusiastic beer drinkers were always hoping to find something new on tap—and bars were happy to oblige. Instead, many bars today are offering fewer draft beers, often using those same lines for pre-mixed cocktails, bulk-packaged wine or other beverages.

And Alistair shared some related thoughts over at Fuggled, too, as he bimbled in his dotage:

Maybe I am just entering my curmudgeonly dotage as I creep ever closer to my 50th birthday later this year, but I have found little joy of late browsing the aisles and shelves of the beer retailing world, whether supermarket or specialist. Of course there are beers, usually seasonally available lagers such as Tröeg’s Little Nator, that I happily stock up on when they are available, but usually my little bimbles are more a ritual performed through a misplaced sense of duty, with a hint maybe of self-flagellating hope of something other than yet another “innovation” in the form of an IPA.

Getting a bit legal for a moment, I came across some excellent discussion of  an important topic in the hospitality trade from a team of Australian academics, thoughts about the alleged “perks” in the tavern and grub trade and how they undermine hospitality workers’ rights:

As one chef put it: “Free steak dinners don’t pay my rent or stop my boss docking pay for smoke breaks.” Our data also show that workers with formal agreements were significantly more likely to receive their legal entitlements, including proper rest breaks and overtime pay, compared to those without. Why does this matter? Because protecting rights is not just about fairness. It is about safeguarding the sustainability of an industry we all rely on. Research shows when businesses rely on unpaid labour or ignore basic entitlements, they undercut fair competition, contribute to worker burnout and drive talent out of the sector.

Remember when craft brewing workers were expected to be more interested in passion than pay? What? Still?!?! Boak and Bailey (much to the contrary being unfailingly fair competators in the weekly beer new update scene***) have taken time out from their eastern European sojourns to discuss the source of skull iconography in the craft beer scenic landscape:

David Ensmiger, quoted above, suggests that in the context of punk music and skateboarding, skulls and skeletons represent a certain ‘apartness’ from mainstream culture. To paraphrase his argument, skaters, punks and bikers are monsters created by society, who delight in horrifying and repulsing ‘normies’. There’s also a more obvious sense in which skull imagery is about confronting death, and embracing life. People who fly skull flags see themselves as fearless risk takers, in both physical terms (skateboarding accidents hurt) and in terms of their cultural status. Again, this is exactly the kind of attitude craft beer producers either wanted to tap into (appropriate) or which actually reflected their lifestyles.

Fabulous stuff from they themselves, as is so often the case. I added my two cents that there was an association of the imagery with the Motörhead influenced X-treme beer era which picked up 1980s Mad Max post apocalyptic cool. Rock. On.

Speaking of the 1980s, I had no idea that stubbies were a thing outside of Canada before 40 years ago but here were are… or rather there we are according to Anthony Gladman:

The area around Fressin, known as Les Sept Vallées, is nice enough in a damp kind of way, but it’s not exactly what you picture when you hear ‘holiday house in France’. It soon became clear Dad had chosen it just to be close to the Wine Society’s outpost in nearby Hesdin. Still, when I think back to my visits there — which took me from callow teen to knackered young dad myself — what I remember drinking with Dad was beer. Or stubbies, to be precise: little 250 ml bottles of Kronenbourg, bought dirt cheap by the slab from the local hypermarché.

Are you a curious person? I know I sure am and I also know you probably are because you are here reading this very sentence. This one too. Well, in order to compensate for your undoubtedly regular sense of disappointment founded here week after week, Eoghan Walsh has a plan designed just for you – and for you and especially just for you:

Before the big announcement, a slightly smaller one – Brussels Notes turns 100 next week! That’s 100 newsletters from me to you since I first started sending them out over four years ago, and since I revived the format at the beginning of last year. A huge thank you to every one of you who’ve signed up to get them in your inbox, and to everyone who’s reading this or has read an article in the past. To mark the occasion, I thought I’d do an Ask Me Anything edition for newsletter #100. What’s my favourite bar? My favourite building? Best beer? Worst beer? The worst thing about Brussels? The best thing? Weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me in the city? Oddest thing I’ve ever seen. Best sandwich? How I actually pronounce my name?

My bet it’s pronounced “Ewan”, right? Jason Wilson is actually also possibly pronounced “Ewan” but that is entirely not the point. The point is he made a very interesting observation on US wine buying habits these days as it relates to place:

These days, in the middle of a worldwide wine crisis, it’s never been tougher to sell wine based on place. In fact, over the past couple of years, I’ve observed that a certain type of wine influencer/educator has begun to steer completely clear of talk about terroir. At the low end, the focus is on a certain populism focused on, say, wine in cans or alternative packaging. But much of the higher-end natural wine chatter also avoids a deep discussion of place. While the best natural-wine producers are committed terroirists, a lot of the derivative, middling natty wine talk is way more about winemaking technique and philosophy…

The comments are in the context of the risks inherent in the German legal wine standards adding concepts equivalent premier cru and grand cru to the labels of their bottles. The risks being that the promise better be fulfilled. Does this relate to good beer? “Local” in terms of a beer made of things from this or that “here” (or even a “there” for that matter) has never really taken off even when the best examples ring true. In a trade where popular populisit “IPA” branding has devolved to a euphemism for “maybe better” how could that little old charmer “local” have ever hoped to rise to the top?

Question: is there value in Vittles?

Finally, as you can see to the right, Mr. DJ made all my dreams come true with this post on BlueSky.  And that is it! Until we meet again, please check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday (…as long as all their holiday fun doesn’t get in the way…) and Stan (….not quite…) each and every Monday. Then listen to a few of the now rarely refreshed Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the (sometimes even but never) odd Fridays. And maybe The British Food History Podcast. Maybe? And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword is out there with the all the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer featuring visits to places like… Michigan! All About Beer has given space to some trade possy podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast with an episode just last month!. And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good but, hmm, they’ve also gone quiet this year. The rest of these are largely dead. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  As has We Are Beer People. The Share looked to be back with a revival but now its gone quiet. And the Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. VinePair packed in Taplines as well. All dead and gone.  There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. Nope – that ended a year ago.   The Moon Under Water is gone – which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that – but only had the one post. Such is life. Such is beer podcasting and newlettering!

*See also 2024, 2019 and 2008 for more Vicky Vicky fun fun fun.
**It’s terrible sweet how, in part, Bourcard relies on a theory that it’s cell phone photos and tracking by parents that has deterred youth drinking – but that they will snap back to act and drink like good boomers as soon as they get their own iPhone accounts.
***According to an unsolicited report authored by something called BB Consulting Associates International that I received by email spam filter in, umm, June 2024.

Your Beery News Notes For The Week That I Start To Watch The Maple Leafs Again

I have a little rule. I have been a Toronto Maple Leafs fan since the 1960s. I know that because I still have most of my 1969-70 O-Pee-Chee hockey cards. I also know that they have sucked for most of the 55 years since I bought them. Oh, there was Darryl and there was Wendle but in the last decade they’ve only won one playoff series – until this season. So my rule is obvious. I won’t watch them unless they win a series. Which they now have. And they won the next series’s game one too. Update: and game two.

Speaking of victory, I noticed an interesting sidenote to the Australian election last weekend with the after party for the winner Anthony Albanese being fueled by Albo Pale Ale. Albo? Albo:

…you might have heard of Albo. When this beer was brewed, he was simply the brewery’s local Member of Parliament who was known for his support of the craft beer industry, trains and the ocassional spot of DJing. He went on to be the 31st Prime Minister of Australia and his younger self will forever be immortalised in this beer, which sure beats a toilet.

BTW – that toilet. Speaking of objects holding liquids, Kevin K commented an interesting comment this week: “always seems there’s a strong lack of editing for glassware articles.” Is that a lack of strong editing? And is “strong lack” related to Strong Bad? Whatever it is… I fully agree. What was the object of his disappointment?

Cusack gave a thumbs-down to two common beer glasses. “Pints and mugs are fine for a quick pour, but they do nothing to highlight what makes an IPA good. Too open, too wide, they lose aroma fast,” Cusack told The Takeout. “Steins are worse — thick glass insulates the beer too much and dulls your senses.” Pints and mugs don’t actually do much to enhance any beer’s flavor (not just IPAs), but mugs and glass steins, with their thick walls and side handle, will do the job well when keeping your beer cold is a priority.

Me, I drink pretty much everything from the same hefeweizen glass if I am wanting to pay attention. Lots of schozz space to get right in there for a sniff. And it holds the temperature well. And it allows me to compare one experience with another a neutral yet effective context. Otherwise, anything will do. What’s up with a glass per beer anyway? It’s like audiophiles who have different stereo speakers for different sorts of music.* Who can afford that? Do you really want to be like audiophiles? It all sounds connected to hyperflavor related status anxiety.

On a similar theme, I was really impressed with one aspect of the announcement from the World Beer Cup.** Transparency. For such an overblown title,*** it was interesting to see that the relatively low number of entries competing in most categories. An average of 73 entries per category. No doubt most were perfectly swell but doesn’t that mean it’s pretty likely that any winner is actually not going to be the best out there? And, with only 53 entries, they found a way to discover that SNPA is an ESB! Mucho guffaw resulted.

Mike Seay may have caught the moment both neatly and tidily with this comment this week:

I need to start asking for tasters before ordering an IPA or even a Pale. You see, sometimes they end up being hazy when there was no indication of it on the menu description. And I am over hazzies…for now. Yes I could always ask for a taster before, but I like to just go for it. Give me a pint and I’ll drink it, even if it ends up sucking. But I am getting too many New Englands when I was wanting a West Coast, so I gotta start asking, I guess.

Hazzies? Is that what we call a grouping of badly thought out hazies now? Maybe huzzies or hizzies even? And exactly how many beer educators did it take to get us to the place where you can’t order a beer and have a clue what you’re about to drink? And is that part of what Jeff meant by the wallpaper phase? Or perhaps what led us to this point:

Craft beer isn’t new and exciting anymore, and almost everyone has heard of it, and the vast majority of potential future customers have experimented with it. What breweries have to do now is sell their product to people who are already familiar with it—but also blasé about it. Craft beer is part of the wallpaper of alcoholic beverages now—present, but in the background, familiar and easy to ignore. Selling a product like that is very different than selling beer in 2000.

And Matthew C perhaps spoke to a similar idea with another sector of the beer trade in his note on Bluesky introducting this week’s feature at Pellicle:

Top stuff from Emmie Harrison-West on the site today about a really interesting no and low alcohol brewery near Edinburgh. It might be our last no and low piece, at least for now, as despite lots of (apparent) interest in what is often cited as the fastest growing sector in beer, the pieces we’ve published to date have struggled to gain traction with our audience.

What to make of all that? Perhaps conversely but definitely offering a ray of hope in this, Jamie Goode wrote an interesting article on standardization and balance (for the lyrically named WineMag.Co.Za) which easily applies to a lot of good beer:

This is the problem with the concept of balance. It can lead to a certain stylistic homogeneity; to boring wines that tick all the boxes, but which fail to thrill. Alongside this concept of balance, we have the problematic notion that we always want to drink the same sort of wine. There are even people who peddle protocols for matching consumers with the right wine for them. The truth is that we want to drink different wines on different occasions. I have lots of wines at home, but it’s not easy finding the right wine for the right moment, even though I have only wines that I like to hand. I think the concept of balance in wine is next to useless. It should be about whether or not a wine has personality, and whether or not that wine, with its personality, is the right wine for this particular drinking occasion. I want my wines to be interesting…

Me too. And my beers. But what is it to be interesting… and what makes it so? (And, he thought to himself, if we just left these clinky drinky things to individuals and their own interests, well, what would we do with all the experts and, horrors, the editors?) Hmm…  Drew Starr has an idea that perhaps may help frame the concept:

I think we discussed my theory of cognition for quirky regional food I conjured after Nick Tahou’s. Anyone can appreciate it, but you have to try it before your brain matures at 26 to have a love that defies objectivity. You always love it more when older, because the memory of youth is delicious… Ask me or anyone who grew up in Western MA who makes the world’s best burger, we’ll say White Hut, an objectively incorrect answer that we are incapable of being made to believe otherwise.

So… the things that are interesting are things that relate to the person by whom… in which… that interesting thing is / was experienced. Radical.  Matty himself, for the double, had a similar sort of tingly sensation this week, not from a recollection of youth but from being in the audience for a performance of Hamlet:

Such was the intensity and physicality of the performance as a whole that I can’t stop thinking about it. Samuel Blenkin, playing the titular role, was gripping. The way music and dance was weaved throughout meant I couldn’t look away for the whole 90 minutes. It was dark and visceral and unrelenting and sad and funny. Of course, I had to go for a pint and sit down afterwards, to help myself come down. But as I did so I realised in witnessing such a brilliant act of creativity my very soul itself felt nourished. I was full to the brim. There are moments in life, sometimes major, sometimes fleeting, but they leave a permanent mark on you. My first sip of IPA at Odell Brewery, devilled kidneys on toast at St. John, Mills Foxbic at Hereford Beer House, the reuben on rye at Choice City Deli. These are experiences that helped shape my worldview.

Is that what Goode meant by interesting? Probs. As one who is perpetually in that condition, when they prepare the syllabus for the Master degree seminar on The Beer Nut this will be one of the key passages the class will have to study:

…I didn’t think it worked very well, but I’m told by Kev the brewer and owner that I’m wrong, which is fair enough…

Returning to that piece in Pellicle, the not wrong and definitely interesting Emmie Harrison-West offered up a portrait of Jump Ship Brewing, low-no alcohol brewers near Edinburgh, and unpacked the background:

Like many of us as we age, Sonja found that her tolerance for booze had dropped. She was becoming irritable after drinking and dreaded the day after. “I was drinking less, but it was that Tuesday night beer that I was really craving. You know, when you’re finally sitting down, the kids are in bed, you’re tired and up early for work,” she says. Sonja discovered that an NA beer really scratched that itch, but she still felt like something was missing: choice. Sure, she was making better choices for herself, but found her options in terms of the variety of NA beers available were woefully limited. “That’s when I thought, ‘why don’t I just do it?’,” she tells me.

Swtiching a bit abruptly to the Health News Desk: the recent flurry of discussion about Savory IPA got me thinking again about the need to label the ingredients on beer. See, like a lot of people I am allergic to MSG – the key additive apparent miracle that transforms a humdrum beer into an amazing new style! It’d be nice to have informed decision making so I can know if my respiratory equiment is going to seize up or not.

And, perhaps taking a breather from all that above, I really liked David Jesudason‘s piece**** on the Alehouse in Reading where he found people ready to just have a chat:

It never was my plan to travel 50-odd miles in a four-hour round trip for this specific chat but that’s where my day took me. I had a vague idea to visit the Alehouse for the second time because, inspired by The Shiralee, I wanted somewhere a bit rough and ready where I knew there would be people drinking in the day despite the broad sunshine outside. The pub is covered head to toe in pump clips, has a queue of pickled egg jars at the bar and various hair rock songs being played through the speakers – the only tune I could place was Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls, and it’s been a long time since these women made the rocking world go round.

All of which, coming full circle, brings me to the thought that Boak and Bailey shared on their Patreon back channel last weekend and gave us all the “oomph” of the year in beer, YTD-wise:

Jeff Alworth’s wallpaper post got us thinking about lots of things, but mostly that time passes quickly before you notice it. It’s easy to feel as if craft beer is a thing that just landed, beloved of fresh-faced hipsters. But even in its most recent form – IPAs and punks and skulls – it’s been around for several decades. Thornbridge Jaipur, an especially significant beer in British craft beer, turns 20 this year. There are people at university now who have never lived in a Jaipurless world – who don’t remember a time before BrewDog, or Beavertown.

Me: “I’m not 62! That old guy over there is!!!” What is it we want from all this anyway? Being part of Club Craft? Nope. A nice chat sound perfectly nice, if I am being honest. And a nice beer in any frikkin’ glass I feel like using. See, the failings of craft now so evident in 2025 – especially the failure to reign victorious as was clearly promised a decade or more ago – reminds me of what I recently read in that grab bag of convenient quips for we the aged alumni with the BAs, The New Yorker, on the translation of Catullus:

Precisely what makes much of Catullus’ work so appealing and “relatable” to modern audiences—the offhand charm, the impish vulgarity, the jazzy colloquialisms—makes him that much more difficult to bring into modern English. Ordinary language, after all, has a far shorter shelf life than does the elevated language of high literature; translations of Catullus that are barely twenty years old already feel dated. Peter Green’s “Wretched Catullus, stop this stupid tomfool stuff” sounds positively Victorian next to Mitchell’s “Wretched Catullus, stop this crazy longing.”

It lives in the past tense, does craft. It is, to my adult chidren, exactly that: stupid tomfool stuff.  Not beer, mind you, which is good. Beer remains interesting.

That’s it for this week. I am on a train later today so may be delayed in responding to all your emails and DMs and stuff. Bear with me. Until we meet again, please check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday (…as long as all their holiday fun doesn’t get in the way…) and Stan (….not quite…) each and every Monday. Then listen to a few of the now rarely refreshed Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the (sometimes even but never) odd Fridays. And maybe The British Food History Podcast. Maybe? And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword is out there with the all the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer featuring visits to places like… Michigan! All About Beer has given space to some trade possy podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast with an episode just last month!. And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good but, hmm, they’ve also gone quiet this year. The rest of these are largely dead. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  As has We Are Beer People. The Share looked to be back with a revival but now its gone quiet. And the Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. VinePair packed in Taplines as well. All dead and gone.  There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. Nope – that ended a year ago.   The Moon Under Water is gone – which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that – but only had the one post. Such is life. Such is beer podcasting and newlettering!

*“Disco Woofer” would be a great name for an DIPA. Or a speaker.
**No doubt intended to be confused with the equally grandiosely World Beer Awards. Not to mention the World Awards of Beer.
***Olympics? That all? Surely it’s the Mount Olympus of Beer! Even as the BA continues its logical retraction, the fawning seems to be enhanced.
****His writing in which reminded me of another passage from another article in that same issue of The New Yorker from March 30 2025: “Much of the art of “Encounters with the Archdruid” lies in the way that McPhee manages to be both there and not there. He bathes his aching feet in the water. He recalls other trips he has taken with Brower and, separately, with Park. He searches for copper-bearing rocks, and, when he finds them, gets excited. But he never reveals whose side he is on. When it comes to the great question of the piece—to mine or not to mine—he gets out of the way.“

A Brief Yet Utterly Fascinating First Beery News Notes For May 2025

Brief? I am on the road as you read this. At a Holiday Inn out by the airport if you have to know. Just a brief trip but that is going to mean a brief update. Why? Why??? Stop screaming that word into your pillow. It will be OK. Why do we know it will be OK? Because… as The Beer Nut has proven by hitting another milestone as he enters his third decade of beer blogging. Meaning we can never stop. Never. Ever. Another thing that never stops is the cycle of life that marks the work from planting seed to harvest time and, again, to planting again. Just to make you beer. As my near neighbours, the farmers and brewers at MacKinnon Brothers, showed when they shared this photo and these thoughts below on FB:

First planting of the year—no-till malting barley into soybean stubble. We’re testing new aftermarket firming and closing wheels on 6 of the 32 rows to see if they improve seed placement over the factory setup.

Martin, sitting in a pub enjoying a pint of Bass, has no doubt thought of that sort of thing from time to time but this week he raised another excellent question on the tension between the campaign to get UNESCO recognition for cask and the campaign to get CAMRA members to stick to “indie” beer:

I watched as a succession of unapologetic young folk arrived at the bar, went “ooh” and pointed at the red triangle. Yes, a national is finally putting a bit of money behind Bass, though frankly only pints this good will keep the pumps flowing and make sure it stays on the bar. Not everyone is delighted by this enthusiasm for Bass, whether because of ideology… CAMRA’s Conference instructed the NE to “ensure that all relevant CAMRA publications and communications pledge preferential support to beer producers and suppliers that are independent of the influence of the multinational brewers, and to make the case persistently for this stance.”

So, is the UNESCO campaign “Bass Inclusive” (BI) but the CAMRA one is Bass exclusionary” (BE) ?  A report in The Guardian, while setting out what I had thought would be pretty well known information, adds a twist:

In its annual independent beer report, parts of which have been shared with the Guardian, the trade body for British indie brewers said tough conditions were exacerbated by difficulty selling to local pubs… Siba members told a survey that 60% of the pubs within 40 miles were inaccessible to them, choking off potential sources of revenue and reducing choice for consumers thirsty for more interesting options at the bar. They blamed conditions imposed by large breweries and some pub chains, including financial agreements that impose conditions on what beers pubs can sell.

So if Bass is brewed by a large multinational and it is engaging in practices which are detrimental to small brewers who, among other things, brew fine cask ales… is the UNESCO designation application going to be BI or BE? WIll it carve out those fine cask ales which are made by the faceless nasties of international capitalism? Asking for a friend.

Speaking of machines, Boak and Bailey continue on their travels and have considered the role of well choreographed hospitality:

In the past week, we found ourselves in two such machines in Bucharest, the capital of Romania. Both drew us in with beautiful, historic buildings and the promise of decent mainstream beer… We really wanted to see inside the building, though, and also really wanted to drink a decent lager in vaguely trad surroundings, so we made our booking and braced ourselves. On arrival, we were intercepted by a member of staff whose only job was to assign people to free tables and escort them to their seats. She wasn’t exactly cheerful, but she was certainly efficient. She handed us off to a waitress controlling a section of about 10 or 15 tables who was just as friendly as she needed to be to avoid making us feel totally unwelcome. When we took a little too long to decide what to drink she got, perhaps, a touch impatient. But, like in the beer halls of Cologne, or The Dog & Bell in Deptford, once you accept that you’re not there to make friends with the staff, this brusqueness becomes part of the offer.

You know, I have played such a role in this life from time to time. As an usher, a waiter and to be honest a lawyer. I’ve said “right this way” as I led then to their seat, a table or… umm… the dock. Yes, standardized impersonal presentation in hospitality are efficient and reliable yet also impersonal and distant. You are being served but, in turn, so is the operation in a reciprocal sense. And sometimes even mentioning your past experience can open up a bit of conversation – but in other situations, you know, it can be taken as an insult. Govern yourselves accordingly. They don’t really care about the time you too failed to put in that order.

Speaking of touchy situations… would you drink out of a skull… have you?

Of course nobody wants to end up as a wine cup, but it must be a consolation to know that some very distinguished historical figures lived on in the drinks cabinet. One outstanding example was the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus I, who ruled in Constantinople from 802 to 811. After the emperor was ambushed by the Bulgars in a mountain pass and slaughtered alongside his army, his head was delivered to the splendidly named Bulgar khan, Krum the Fearsome. According to a Byzantine chronicler, Krum “hung it on a pole so as to exhibit it to the tribes that came before him and to dishonour us. After that, he laid bare the skull, riveted it on the outside with silver and, in his pride, made the chieftains of the Slavs drink from it.”

The article in question being from The Times and the facts that led to the question being newsworthy cause Dr. Alice Roberts to comment “I can’t believe this isn’t a spoof article. It seems to be supporting a very questionable approach to human remains.” The facts in questions being some Oxford dons doing it based on an ancient tradition going back to … err… 1946.

Glut news:

The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) shares export figures annually. For several years, Michael Kravitz of the Diving for Pearls blog published an excellent analysis of this data, predicting in 2017: “If volume sales don’t increase [significantly], then we’re going to start seeing A TON of well-aged malt whisky within 5 years. If this continues further, there is going to be an embarrassment of oversupply in 10 years. Even if industry-wide production is cut in half in 2017, it would be too late to stop The Loch.”

Similarly perhaps, good play-by-play from CBC by Dave Infante, highlighting the potentially irrational exuberence in the pep rally:

Matt Gacioch of the Brewers Association notes that U.S. craft brewing’s -4% volume drop in 2024 was the largest since the trade org started tracking that metric. “Consumers feel much worse than they’re acting.” Even as sentiment tanks, people are still spending on-trend for now. Doesn’t explain why they’re spending less on craft beer, but hey, listen, silver linings!

There was a similar theme in the Beer Insider Insights newsletter this week:

… in 2012-2013, households led by folks under 30 spent more like 1.1% of their disposable income on alcohol. That dropped to 0.74% a decade later, about 1/3 less. Households run by younger folks will generally have less income, disposable or otherwise, Bourcard reminds. But the fact that Gen Z is already spending less on alcohol could stick around. Then too, the most cited reasons of “health and vanity” are “greatly overblown,” in his view.

I love how “greatly overblown” gets something of the rimshot treatment after those sorts of stats. Silver linings! More serious in terms of the inquiry, David Jesudason wrote this week about a puzzle:

Dennis Morris took a series of photos of life in Southall in the 1970s after apparently driving past the West London suburb on the way to a Bob Marley gig. This one was sent to me by a friend visiting an exhibition of his in Paris. I’ve asked people if this is the legendary Glassy Junction… but none can confirm. All I know is this is a Sikh pub landlord photographed in Southall in 1976. So if anyone has any idea what pub this is or the name of the man pictured, please get in touch!

I don’t know anything about that. Do you? No? Well, did you know, if you are not sufficiently disappointed in the beer in front of you, that there’s an app for that?

…a new experimental measurement tool, created by scientists assessing the concentration of DMS in beer through “smartphone-based colorimetry” uses a “paper-based analytical device (PAD)” which was made using an “immobilising a chromogenic reagent phase consisting of alkaline nitroprusside in a gelatin hydrogel”. Breweries and beer judges analyse the DMS content of products to ensure consistent flavour quality and consumer satisfaction.

Lordy. I am loving this “off-flavour” studies revival. Remember last week? That was excellent. Feels all 2012. Is that unkind? You know what’ll perk this conversation up? Rice malt, that’s what:

The rice malt can also reduce crop-growing acreage needs by half or more, because the research shows it produces more grain per acre than barley, while having an equivalent or greater sugar extract potential… The study, which is derived from the University of Arkansas, also identified how malting has the potential to decrease time and energy costs and make using rice more feasible for more small-scale craft brewers — especially when creating gluten-free beers. Since rice is cultivated globally, the analysis highlighted how it also has the benefit of serving as a viable malting grain for tropical and subtropical countries that would otherwise need to rely on barley imports for brewing.

You know… I wonder about the arsenic. Any mention of the arsenic? Not sure. Hmm… and that’s it. Not much this week. It’ll get bettter. Next week for sure. Let me check my calendar. No, away briefly again. Until then, please check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday (…as long as all their holiday fun doesn’t get in the way…) and Stan (….who is also going on his own holiday break so may not be there…) each and every Monday. Then listen to a few of the now rarely refreshed Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the (sometimes even but never) odd Fridays. And maybe The British Food History Podcast. Maybe? And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword is out there with the all the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer featuring visits to places like… Michigan! All About Beer has given space to some trade possy podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast with an episode just last month!. And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good but, hmm, they’ve also gone quiet this year. The rest of these are largely dead. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  As has We Are Beer People. The Share looked to be back with a revival but now its gone quiet. And the Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. VinePair packed in Taplines as well. All dead and gone.  There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. Nope – that ended a year ago.   The Moon Under Water is gone – which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that – but only had the one post. Such is life. Such is beer podcasting and newlettering!

These Be Your Mid-April Mid-Life And Perhaps Even Fairly Mid Beery News Notes

Easter week! You’d be right in thinking it was a month ago with all the talk this week of of green beer here and green beer there. But no, it is the time of the bunny who lays eggs which happen to be made of chocolate. Christ! And each Easter is also reason to revisit this 2008 post of mine on the lack of Easter beers – which included, as illustrated, perhaps the oddest thing I have ever published on this here blog of mine. But, of course, the main event of the long weekend is the old man’s birthday, me being the old man in question. Thank you for all the cards! Sixty-two. Whaaaaa Hoooooo! Said no one never. This very evening I am celebrating by going to a ukelele orchestra concert. I have authorized myself to slip out early just in case. Still, I do hope it is silly enough to justify the price of admission.

Enough about me! First off this week, have I mentioned the global economic mood?  The CEO of Mexico’s Constellation Brands Bill Newlands has:

About half of Constellation’s beer sales are from Hispanic consumers… with the demographic accounting for 78% of its total revenue last quarter. The Wall Street Journal report noted that many immigrants in Southern California and Texas have begun avoiding liquor stores, where they are often forced to show identification. Many people have stopped shopping at supermarkets after 6 p.m., hoping to avoid immigration raids… While Modelo, Corona and Pacifico are exempt from the Trump administration’s 25% tariff on Mexican imports, the company is not able to dodge the 25% tariff on aluminum when it comes to their canned beer imports.

Being from somewhere matters apparently. And speaking of tariffs,* James Beeson posed an interesting question in The Grocer: is local a liability in these trade war times? And then he helpfully explored the implications:

These liquids command a hefty price premium thanks to protected geographical indicators (PGIs) which guard the product’s name from misuse or imitation… PGI status offers “clear authenticity and product differentiation in consumers’ eyes”, and plays “a crucial role in premiumisation”… Tariffs certainly look like bad news for Rémy, which generated 38% of its sales in FY24 from the Americas. Thanks to its overexposure to cognac, it also sells 62% of its PGI spirits outside the market in which they enjoy this status.

So being from somewhere can be quite damaging. Plus… never thought over exposure to cognac could be a good thing but there you are.  But then in TDB, David Jesudason was arguing that things should be more clearly from somewhere:

It’s especially concerning because most drinkers cringe at the thought of Madri – the supposed soul of Madrid – being brewed in the UK by Coors – while this unnamed beer is actually being brewed at a renowned British craft brewery. The type of brewery that brews a lot of award-winning tipples that define modern British beer for discerning drinkers prepared to pay premium prices. And this beer is no exception. Which shows there’s no need to lie. But here’s the payoff: by claiming a beer is brewed in Germany not Great Britain what exactly is a British beer company saying? Bavaria has better water than Burton? Hamburg has better brewing techniques than London? Perhaps all British brands will proudly say where their beer is brewed if cask were to become UNESCO recognised and we took our heritage seriously.

THEN… Will Hawkes considered in his latest London Beer City monthly how beer from somewhere might not really be about that somewhere at all and this might not be very good in these times:

American influence – and, more specifically, American hop flavour – has fuelled London’s brewing renaissance over the past few decades. From Neck Oil to Pale Fire, London brewers have paraded their passion for (and understanding of) Obama-era American craft brewing. American Pale Ales on London bars have become legion. Wham bam thank you Uncle Sam. The world, though, has changed. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to elect Donald Trump once might be regarded as misfortune; to do it twice is just fucking stupid. Trump’s introduction of tariffs, the bovine threats to Canada and Denmark, the increasingly aggressive way in which visitors to the USA are being treated: this points in one direction and one direction only. America acknowledges and wants no allies, and that includes Britain. MAGA is unleashed and obnoxious.

Interesting. Will the world reject US craft just as it’s rejecting the Tesla? It is also interesting that making booze under licence was one of the solutions mentioned by Mr. Beeson while is the problem for Mr. Jesudason. Hmm… Speaking of critical thinking, Katie M. took immediate and visceral objection to this article in The Guardian:

Is the editorial team all on holiday leave or something? There are SO many talented writers out there looking for an opportunity like this, and so many editors who do their jobs with skill. How can a national paper be so careless as to publish something so unpolished. The writer isn’t even to blame here, the whole process is, from commission to upload.

There was a lot of unhappiness in the susequent BluesGuy comments all of which confused me a bit until I got to this one that shared a correction to the online edition: “This article was amended on 13 April 2025 to replace some words that were omitted during the editing process.” Yikes!  The post repair job was still a bit much. As ripe with superlatives as the worst of beer writing. Very much overly rouged, as the kids might say. So much unhappiness. Good thing, then, that Gary shared the good news – the Clark’sroast beef sandwich is back in Syracuse NY!

For longtime locals, the main event is the return of a Syracuse bar legend: the Clark’s Ale House roast beef sandwich. Clark’s Ale House, which operated in two locations from 1992 to 2016, was famous for its roast beef sandwich. It was simple — just medium-rare top round, thinly-sliced red onions, cold cheddar cheese between an onion roll from Di Lauro’s Bakery — but it was legendary. And when Clark’s closed for good, its devoted fans were left craving. “We’ve missed this sandwich so much,” Beach said, standing in the Crooked Cattle’s kitchen earlier this week. ”But now it’s back.”

That artisic rendering up there is the sandwich I ate at Clark’s over twenty years ago. Now… if they can just bring back the house ale and the pub’s layout.

Note #1: Katie Mather has returned to owner operated blogging.

Note #2: do you like salt in beer. People have. Since at least 1835.

Stan also spoke of an ingredient this week – specifically the hop – in his Hop Queries edition 8.12 and shared this about the return to work of two US government employees:

Two USDA-ARS employees involved with public hop research were among thousands of probationary employees who went back at work after the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) issued a 45-day stay on their termination (see Hop Queries Vol. 8, No. 10). Francisco Gonzalez, a hop horticulturist, is one of four scientists central to the public hop research program. Brandon Sandoval is a technician assisting Gonzalez… That’s not to say that things are “back to normal” at research facilities in Oregon and Washington. Not all support staff has returned to work and what happens after a hiring freeze lifted is not clear. Also, the USDA has warned employees that a significant reduction in force is likely.

Some chat this week about what was micro then craft now independent. As exhibit A we have Pete of The Times* who gave a quite reasonable explanation how craft was lost to bigger interests… just as, I suppose, micro fell to the avarice of big craft:

To my palate, Beavertown’s Neck Oil and Gamma Ray, and Camden Hells — now owned by corporations that brew as cost-effectively as they can — don’t taste as good as they did. Quality hops are costly. And proper lagering means storing beers in chilled vats for weeks. So what are drinkers to do if they want beer that’s well made by small players? Trade bodies such as Siba, which once promoted craft beer, now champion “indie” beer instead. Siba defines an indie brewer as one that’s UK-based, has less than 1 per cent of the UK beer market and is not connected with any other business bigger than that size. It issued a logo for breweries such as Fyne Ales, Vocation and Five Points to use on packaging and pump clips.

Then, as exhibit B, consider Phil Cook who gave what can only be described as commentary from a view from (Ed.: *…checks map…*) well below my feet:

‘Independent’ remains the adjective of choice in promoting and organising the many Australian breweries that might otherwise be grouped under ‘craft’ or (in earlier times) ‘micro’. But companies who persist in waving it around as they take part in the recent string of mergers, consolidations, and various other entanglements are straining the word to breaking point. It’s too much like someone insisting “being single is really important to me, that’s why I married another bachelor!”

Does it matter? Well, “it” isn’t any one thing. First, locally the word “independent” never really took off in Canada. Even well past “craft” we are… still craft. And if we look at the UK standard of 1% of the market that has little use for the US trade where the small guys got co-opted long ago to falling into line helpfully to support the aspirations of the large ones. These things, too, will not save craft beer. And does any of this matter so much as we continue on the human race’s continued shift away from the bottle? Consider this startling news from The Guardian on the state of the global wine trade:

The OIV said the consumer was now paying about 30% more for a bottle now than in 2019-20 and overall consumption had fallen by 12% since then. In the United States, the world’s top wine market, consumption fell 5.8% to 33.3m hectolitres. Delgrosso said tariffs ordered by the US president, Donald Trump could become “another bomb” for the wine industry. Sales in China remain below pre-Covid levels. In Europe, which accounts for nearly half of worldwide sales, consumption fell 2.8% last year. In France, one of the key global producers, 3.6% less wine was consumed last year. Spain and Portugal were among the rare markets where consumption increased.

Still on the holiday in Romania and pushing back against that trend by all accounts, Boak and Bailey took time to send out their monthly newsletter in which they shared thoughts on one way the pub trade can respond – reduce the congnitive load:

In the context of a holiday, a slight increase in cognitive load can be pleasurable, and part of the fun. It’s about the line between stress and stimulus… How can pubs and breweries reduce cognitive load? The experience of a Wetherspoon will rarely be thrilling but at least (kliche Klaxon) “You know where you are with a ‘Spoons”. All sorts of venues could, and can do, do some of the same things… the single greatest way to reduce the cognitive load of any experience is to keep doing it. However weird and complicated your local pub might be, by the time it is your local, you’ll know how it works and won’t find it weird at all.***

Does a gay bar at a zoo convey significant cognitive load? David Jesudason explains how you might have found that out if you visited the Hotham Park Zoo in Bognor Regis, West Sussex in the 1980s:

…this magical and enchanting period spawned the Safari Bar, a gay bar playing high NRG music, hosting drag queens and causing merriment that could be heard from considerable distances. The night was the idea of DJs Barrie Appleyard and Ian Harding, who had met at a club in Littlehampton. Ian knew the manager of the zoo and Ian phoned Barrie saying “shall we try something with the zoo, you know, gay nights or something?” They found a cafeteria (originally built as a small mammal house) that was tucked away in the back of the zoo and transformed this functional space into a jungle-themed gay bar on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights.

What went on each Thursday? Hmm. Speaking more or less on whether less is maybe more or maybe not, at the beginning of the month Retired Martin shared his thoughts on coming changes to the Good Beer Guide based on this motion that was before the gathering last weekend:

“MOTION 7 : This Conference instructs the National Executive to reduce the number of pubs in the Good Beer Guide from the 2027 edition onwards, to ensure only quality pubs are featured.“

Have the results been published beyond the shadowy membership cabal? I don’t see any reference on the so-me’s.  What the heck could “quality” mean in such a context? By total contrast, I give you the best line written about beer of the week – if not to this point in the month – must be this one:

The best location for a beer, by far, was at the sausage stand near the city incinerator plant.

And, perhaps relatedly, Tom Morton, who I met through his former BBC Scotland radio show, shared a story of a dubious newpaper restaurant reviews which is… detailed:

The worst meal I’ve ever had was at a café I’ll call Les Vomiteurs in the then seriously untrendy, ungentrified, occasionally unsafe area of Glasgow called Finnieston. This was 1979 and the late Jack House was still writing restaurant reviews in the Evening Times. He’d recommended the tripe at Les Vom and as I’d never tried this intestinal delight, and fancied myself an adventurous junior gourmand, I thought I’d have a go… The formica tables of Les Vomiteurs matched the unwelcoming hardness off the proprietor, who served me up a bowl of white gunge. Boiled tatties and slimy tendrils of cow gut in milk. It was unchewable, the bits of stomach slipping about my mouth like frisky tapeworms. I swallowed, inhaled the potatoes and just made it out of the door in time to throw up the entirety of my lunch in the Argyle Street gutter. So much for acting on restaurant reviews.

I don’t know what to say about that… other than my folks grew up on the Clyde and that is the sort of keen tales of humanity that I grew up with.  And speaking of the unexpected, Jeff wrote an intersting exposé of a bootleg beer he injested in Oregon named Corona Mega – and also provided some details on a resulting lawsuit:

The mystery deepened the more I dug into it. Whatever I bought that night was definitely not regular Corona. For one thing, it was a vastly superior beer. It was a tenth of a point weaker in strength at 4.5%…  The label listed Oz Trading Group of Hidalgo, Texas as the importer, which was an oddly bold move for, to quote the economist Stringer Bell, “a criminal [expletive] enterprise.” (As a spicy aside, the apparent owner of Oz Trading is Oziel Treviño, a Hidalgo city councilperson who was found to have committed voter fraud in 2016.) Curiouser and curiouser, in other words.

And, finally, Pellicle published a piece by David Nilsen on depression and loss,  a tough read that carries the disclaimer that “this article makes frequent and detailed references to suicide and severe depression, therefore reader discretion is advised.” The essay is primarily about the life and the passing of a brewer, Brad Etheridge, at age 43 based on conversations with his wife, Julie Etheridge but it also speaks to the broader context. It also contains this passage:

Cindy Parsons is a psychiatric nurse practitioner and an associate professor of nursing at the University of Tampa in Florida. In 2019, she and colleague Jacqueline Warner Garman (who co-owns Hidden Springs Ale Works in Tampa and is a psychotherapist) gave a presentation at the Craft Brewers Conference, held that year in Denver, on addressing mental health issues in the craft beer industry. She thinks the image of craft beer can make its workers and supporters reluctant to acknowledge the complications of mixing mental health issues and alcohol. “We’re supposed to be the happy people,” she tells me. “Do we really want to address this in our industry?”

My profession, lawyering, also has a significant mix of mental health issues and alcohol and much of what’s written by David rings true. Only by way of one example among many I’ve met, the family friend who was my first articling principal now thirty-three years ago quickly upon my arrival revealed themselves to be drinking a quart of rum to get them through each day. Drank to the death. Grim.

There you have it. A huge range of reading this week. Take your time and until next time when I will be, I promise, older and wise… please check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday (…as long as all their holiday fun doesn’t get in the way…) and Stan going strong again each and every Monday. Then listen to a few of the now rarely refreshed Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the (sometimes even but never) odd Fridays. And maybe The British Food History Podcast. Maybe? And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword is out there with the all the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer featuring visits to places like… Michigan! All About Beer has given space to some trade possy podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast with an episode just last month!. And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good but hmm they’ve also gone quiet this year. The rest of these are largely dead. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  As has We Are Beer People. The Share looked to be back with a revival but now its gone quiet. And the Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. VinePair packed in Taplines as well. All dead and gone.  There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. Nope – that ended a year ago.   The Moon Under Water is gone – which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that – but only had the one post. Such is life. Such is beer podcasting and newlettering!

*Did I? Was I?
**I forgot this: I knew him and apparently drew him way back when.
***Pardon all the ellipsises… ellipsi… but the point was worth making.

Those Humdrum Work Week Beery News Notes For When Someone Else Is Having More Fun Than You

So, the election is halfway through and the pending arse kicking three weeks from now seems to be still on track.  As fans of beer, we are familiar with the concept of attenuation and yeast efficiency. Right? Well, the Tories in Canada have a history of voter inefficiency – which means they have too many of their voters lodged in too few ridings*. You get my point, right? Anyway, no new pictures of beer being poured on the campaign trail to share this week – but to be fair in 2021’s campaign, Bloc quebecois leader Yves-François Blanchet hit a beerfest as illustrated. I am hoping we get more poliiticans at the tap before this all ends on April 28th. Interesting to note that there is at least one Rhinocéros Party** candidates this time around and that at least one candidate is a beer fan:

Anthony Mitchell, a retired elementary school principal running for the Rhinoceros Party in Sarnia-Lambton-Bkejwanong, says he has no campaign budget, just a red nose and a slogan… Mitchell, who grew up in Sarnia, said he’s married, though “my wife doesn’t admit that she’s married to me during the election,” he said. He has two children and six grandchildren. “My hobbies are going to concerts and festivals,” he said. “I brew my own beer in my garage.”

Otherwise… all the news is bad. Still bad. And you all fell bad. And you should. So… it is no surprise that some folk are actually having more fun than you. Much more fun. There they are, off on their holly jollidays saying things like “yipee!!” and “wheeeeeee!!!” And there they are, in Timișoara Romania having more fun than you. Birthplace of the 1989 revolution. Wow. Less happy recently (but probably still happier than you) was The Beer Nut who wrote this upon the consideration of one beer’s branding as compared to the experience of its consumption:

The badge implies that it’s one in a series called “Modern Classics” and that it’s a “celebration stout”. Celebrating what, and how do the whiskey and coffee enter the picture? Not in the flavour, anyway. This tastes very plain indeed, and though it’s not powerhouse-strength, 5.5% ABV is plenty to give a stout character. Here, the extent of the coffee is no more than you’d find in any typical dry stout. There’s nothing resembling whiskey at all, so I doubt it’s barrel-aged. Whisky-soaked oak chips, maybe? Sorry, there are more questions than answers with this one. I was a bit bored by it, not to mention confused.

So many questions, had he. Similarly, question-raising-wise, Lars shared some research on BlueSky, how he came across information from Jutland, Denmark where there were stories related to:

…their “gammeltøl”, strong farmhouse ale brewed in spring and drunk in autumn, that they laid an egg in the barrel. This was common. She adds that “from this egg there might come a basilisk.” That’s not common. Decided to search for “basilisk” and found another mention. She says they believed that if the gammeltøl became too old a basilisk might come into it, and it had eyes everywhere. If it looked at anyone, they died. She’d heard that one place they’d heard the basilisks in the barrel, and then the barrel and the beer were both buried in the ground out of fear of the basilisks.

Creepy.*** Almost as disturbing is this article in The Guardian about how a character in an upcoming film prefers an odd beer cocktail:

“Coke and beer.” Coke and beer. Coke – and beer? Coke and beer! Who is she, this Lucy? And why is she not like other girls? I have rarely been so taken by a trailer. Is this where I’ve been going wrong, I wonder, in dating and in life? I’ve always liked the idea of having a signature drink order. It seems to mark you out as a person of taste and distinction – someone with a history, who knows things. Medium house red says basic, cheap, vaguely health-conscious. Coke and beer, on the other hand, feels provocative, intriguing and a bit peevish, maybe in a sexy way. 

Maybe. Or maybe batshit nutso. Anthony Gladman wrote about perhaps a more sensible drink but perhaps one had at a less sensible time – the nightcap:

As the first drink of the night is different to those that follow, so is the nightcap a drink apart. It is not simply the last drink of the night but the one you sneak in after that — perhaps on your own, but more likely with someone special, someone to whom you’re not quite ready to say goodbye or goodnight. A nightcap is both the drink and the occasion that surrounds it. All we have in life, ultimately, is time. So to opt for a nightcap is to place extra weight on the time spent drinking it and, retrospectively, on the time that led up to it. A nightcap means the evening was so good you can’t allow it to end just yet — or so bad you need to put it right immediately.

That’s one of those things that brings back memories, yes, good and bad. Mainly bad, frankly. Why did I drink that?  Why did I do that? But back to the now and the real and as noted at the end of last week‘s update, the US plunked a tariff on beer and left EU brewers confused as to what exactly was covered by this executive:

The tariff’s scope has left companies uncertain whether to ship — or sit tight and hope for clarification. Belgian brewers, already operating on tight margins, fear a prolonged standoff. “We don’t know how long the measure will be in effect, and that uncertainty is already damaging,” Raf De Jonghe, head of Belgian brewers’ group BEER, told Belgian daily Nieuwsblad. As confusion mounted, the U.S. Commerce Department clarified that the tariff is not intended to apply to the beer itself. “Tariffs on imported beer only apply to the value of the aluminum content of the beer can, and not to the beer itself,” a Commerce Department spokesperson said in a statement emailed to POLITICO. “Imports of the empty aluminum cans will be tariffed for their full value.”

Mexico was confused by the news as well. Everyone‘s confused. It wasn’t just me. What else is going on?  Well, there was one more stake in the heart of “That Craft Thing What Was” is in this note from Beer Marketer’s Insights:

Sunset Distributing, a subsidiary of Hand Family Companies of TN (led by JR Hand) will buy 2 distribs, craft-centric Stone Distributing and NA-bev oriented Classic Dist. Both in one fell swoop. They total about 15 mil cases, about one third NA. Deal expected to close in about 60 days

What was “a key piece of Stone Brewing” is now just a branch of a big beer distributor.  Speaking of big money, according to Craft Brewing Business:

…a rare Chief Oshkosh Crowntainer beer can fetched an eye-popping $111,150 at Morean Auctions. The early 1950s can, believed to be the only one of its kind… It was likely held in a safe at Oshkosh Brewing Co. for years. After the brewery shuttered, the can passed through a series of passionate collectors — from a mailman-car-bartering deal in the ‘70s to a wooden replica carved by a regretful ex-owner. Over the decades, it changed hands through legends of the hobby: Paul Esslinger, Dave Peck, Bob McCoy, and more. Each trade layered mystique, and when it hit the Morean stage in 2025, collectors knew: this was *the* can.

Relatively speaking, Youngs Brewing is doing less well than that old beer can… at least and perhaps only on the stock market:

We regret to report that long term Young & Co.’s Brewery, P.L.C. (LON:YNGA) shareholders have had that experience, with the share price dropping 48% in three years, versus a market decline of about 7.0%. And over the last year the share price fell 23%, so we doubt many shareholders are delighted. Shareholders have had an even rougher run lately, with the share price down 15% in the last 90 days… Young’s Brewery became profitable within the last five years. We would usually expect to see the share price rise as a result. So it’s worth looking at other metrics to try to understand the share price move. Revenue is actually up 19% over the three years, so the share price drop doesn’t seem to hinge on revenue, either.

Why? Similarly with the why, Mike Kanach alerted us all to the fight between two US law firms over, what, a slogan? We don’t do this in the law trade over here in dull old Ontario – which probably helps avoid this sorta stuff:

Raleigh-based Matheson & Associates PLLC filed trademark infringement claims April 2 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, saying that Denver law firm Whitcomb Selinsky PC is causing confusion by using the name “Beer Law HQ.” Matheson attorney John R. Szymankiewicz has used the “Beer Law Center” moniker to promote his legal services at brewers’ conferences since 2013, according to the suit. In 2015, Szymankiewicz federally registered the first of several “Beer Law Center” trademarks in the category of “attorney services.” Szymankiewicz is the founder and managing partner of Beer Law Center, one of Matheson’s subsidiaries along with the firm’s Vice Law Center…

Question: will both Czech beer culture and British cask ale be recognized under the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage?  Given that one has the backing of two web-based beer influencers**** and the other is being promoted by the Czech Beer and Malt Association with, umm, government support, err, I know where my money is going… when I am not saving up for that beer can:

If Czech beer culture gets listed by UNESCO, it would be the second after Belgium, listed in 2016 — which Slunecko said “really boosted the reputation of local beer-making, not only inside Belgium, but also abroad.” The Czech Ministry of Culture already put it on the national list in January — a necessary condition for international recognition — while Slunecko and others are embarking on promoting their bid. 

Note: “Jeremy Clarkson’s beers recalled because of “possible health risk” ” !!!

Finally, in Pellicle, Vince Raison introduced his story of The Green Goddess in Blackheath, London with some refreshingly honest personal reflections on facing the year he turns 64:

The doctor gently suggested some lifestyle changes. More (or some) exercise. Improved diet. The usual stuff. Then she proposed I take three consecutive days off alcohol a week to avoid gout attacks and otherwise unnecessary medication.  “I’ll do you one,” I said, not terribly wisely. She reminded me that it was for my benefit, that I was the only one in this ‘negotiation’ that had any skin in the game, as it were. Not just skin, but actual organs. I have friends who have gone sober and are very happy about it, but that’s not for me, despite their increased vim and vigour. I needed a Third Way. A strategy for survival that still involves my beloved local pub.

That is it for now. While you consider your own actual organs or even holly jollidays, please check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday (…as long as all their holiday fun doesn’t get in the way…) and Stan going strong again each and every Monday. Then listen to a few of the now rarely refreshed Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the (sometimes even but never) odd Fridays. And maybe The British Food History Podcast. Maybe? And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword is out there with the all the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer featuring visits to places like… Michigan! All About Beer has given space to some trade possy podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast with an episode just last month!. And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good but hmm they’ve also gone quiet this year. The rest of these are largely dead. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  As has We Are Beer People. The Share looked to be back with a revival but now its gone quiet. And the Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. VinePair packed in Taplines as well. All dead and gone.  There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. Nope – that ended a year ago.   The Moon Under Water is gone – which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that – but only had the one post. Such is life. Such is beer podcasting and newlettering!

*Yes, we have ridings… not districts or wards or constituencies. Like Nicky Nicky Nine Door and good aged cheddar cheese, its part of the cultural heritage of being settled in significant part by West Country folk two centuries ago. And in this situation so many rural ridings vote Tory, that they can actually lose elections while still getting the most votes nationally. Arse kicking enhancement factor #1.
**And here is their platform of #1 promises…
***To offset that, here is a second, more charming Bluesky thread from Lars.
****Didn’t they try this in 2021?

The First Beery News Notes For March 2025

It’s been a busy week, hasn’t it. A freaky week. I think I’ll try to avoid much thought of the endtimes in this week’s update but, if you need more existential dread, I recommend what Jeff has shared. Good to be reminded by The Onion that mockery is a valid response. But I would say that in all the new battles of the tariffs, this fact was a bit surprising:

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs will hit the US wine industry harder than beer & spirits. Not only is the value of US wine exports to Canada higher than that of beer & spirits combined, wine industry exports are also more dependent on Canada: 34% of U.S wine exports go to Canada (beer 11%, spirits 10%)

Wow. Other than a few from Ridge stuck away for retirement and maybe a few Oregon Pinot, I never touch the stuff. And I won’t be touching any soon in my local LCBO:

March 4, 2025 – TORONTO – As part of Ontario’s response strategy to U.S. tariffs, the government of Ontario has directed LCBO to take operational steps to implement restrictions on all U.S. beverage alcohol sales and related imports into Ontario, effective immediately. LCBO has ceased the purchase of all U.S. products, retail customers are no longer able to purchase U.S. products on lcbo.com and the LCBO app, and wholesale customers, including grocery and convenience stores, bars, restaurants, and other retailers, are no longer able to place orders of U.S. products online. Furthermore, spirits, wine, cider, beer, ready-to-drink coolers/cocktails, and non-alcoholic products produced in the U.S. will no longer be available in our retail stores or LCBO Convenience Outlets.

Yup. Some places are clearing the shelves while others are selling off stock, like the funny folk at the Inuvik Liquor Store in the NWT.

What else is going on? Well, I love this image shared on the FB page for the Brewery History Society submitted by one Paul Sutherland: highways, railways and seven breweries in:

…aerial pictures of the Craigmillar area of Edinburgh taken I’m guessing in the 1930s. I got the originals when I worked at Tyne Brewery in the late 70s. In 2013 I submitted them to a website, now defunct owing to the death of its founder and administrator but still viewable, called Edinphoto. On September 21st of that year a member of the site called Andy Arthur, of Meadowbank, Edinburgh, annotated the pictures with the names of the breweries…

If you zoom in under this link, you will see how all that brewing and transportation infrastructure is pretty impressive… but is any of that still there almost a century later?  Looks like it’s all part of the Innocent Railway Walking Path now.  Speaking of all gone, here’s a life lesson: don’t leave two stories worth of heavy snow on the top level of the parkade. Bad move. No real beer connection other that I once parked in that very spot and went for a beer.

As we Canucks gird our loins and get all buy inter-provincial, Canada’s national broadcaster has revived the story of Gerald Comeau‘s beer run that ended up in the before the top appeal court panel in the land:

He certainly didn’t expect a police sting, a five-year legal battle and a Supreme Court of Canada decision saying he didn’t have the right to purchase that beer without impediment.  “I can go buy any material anywhere in Canada. You can go buy 20 shirts in Quebec, no problem. Why wouldn’t you be able to buy beer,” said Comeau, over a decade after that fateful beer run. But Comeau’s quest to “free the beer” is once again in the spotlight as U.S. President Donald Trump threatens Canada with tariffs and interprovincial trade gets another look. 

Yes, yes… I said I wouldn’t get into this but dropping inter-provincial trade barriers is one way we expect to be changing to fight the tariffs. Careful readers will recall our discussion (you and me, by the way, not the collective individual that marks some beer writing) of the Comeau case back in 2018 when the Supreme Court of Canada ruling came out defending a province’s autonomous right to stop you from buying beer in the next province. Will the Orange Blob’s tantrum change this?

Stan is fighting back, too. He is down by the Gulf of Mexico (Ed.: Mexico? Really?? Keep up with the lingo, Stan!) and he is actually saying so. Speaking of Stan, his latest edition of Hop Queries came out just after last week’s deadline and he shared the implications of the scything of the US federal government’s staff and their devestating effects on the US hops trade:

They include Francisco Gonzalez, a hop horticulturist who was 42 days from finishing his three-year probation period, and Brandon Sandoval, a biological science technician who worked for Gonzalez. Gonzalez had one measuring tape in any empty lab when he started, and now it is fully stocked. He spent two years building a six-acre experimental hop yard customized for irrigation studies, which was to operate at its full capabilities for the first time 2025. It appears both the lab and yard will be idle this year. Just as important going forward is the loss of support staff offering administrative, IT, and facility support services. 

Yowza.  Speaking of changes to the workplace, some spicy stuff in and about the normally mild mannered UK publication The Grocer on the appointment of a certain someone in what looks like a great leap sideways:

Steve Cox, the CEO behind failed beer business In Good Company (IGC), is to join Keystone Brewing Group a little over a month after its two major brands were swallowed up by the Breal-backed group. Cox moves to Keystone having failed to turn around the fortunes of Fourpure and Magic Rock Brewing, both of which were acquired by IGC from Australasian brewer Lion in 2022, but sold to Keystone in distressed circumstances at the end of January.

Staying over there, I like this story about a collective community hop garden developing in Thanet:

Hop Along Thanet, a non-profit making organisation which launched in 2020, encourages its members to grow the crop in their back gardens and allotment plots. The University of Kent at Canterbury has just joined the project and is set to grow 20 plants on its campus. Chris Morrissey, founding member, said: “Its more than a hobby, it’s an involvement with a historic Kent tradition”. Hop Along Thanet is one of a number of community hop growing groups across Kent. It has more than 50 members who have planted 150 hop bines in their gardens and allotments across Thanet.

Thanet was one of the great English brewing centers of the 1600s. Do they even know?

What else? Well, probably best to not write and opinion column in you’re not interested in opinions. It can’t all be about hiding out, being the shadowy figure. Being negative can always be a positive. Like in this startling review of southwest Scotland as a travel destination:

You feel it’s hard to run a business here. It trickles through the scenery, undoing the beauty of the sky and the sea. The peeling paint and the rundown stores with their mossy window ledges add a tinge of gloom. On a mid-February weekend there weren’t many spots to spend money. You can’t get complacent about people coming for the beaches. You need to build around them to get cash flowing all year round. It isn’t enough to call southern Scotland “overlooked” or “forgotten” — two words beloved by travel writers and the tourist board. I am not certain it is our best kept secret.

Wow. And Wee Beefy is back with his first blog post of 2025 and it does somewhat countervale against the pub as convivial community centre line:

It was late on a midweek night in a popular Sheffield pub and probably about 30 minutes prior to closing. Two men I didn’t know came in and sat down and started chatting but quickly one expressed his extreme irritation at them playing rap music, a phrase he couldnt accurately pronounce. After a couple of minutes he shouted “why dont you play some proper music instead of this rap shit” His friend told him to stop shouting which riled him further so he decided to storm over to the counter and shout the same accusation directly at the barman – who said, politely and calmly, that what they were playing was all music, and may even have suggested that some people liked the music they had chosen. Cue embolism number 2.

Katie got the nod in Pellicle for her piece on something she has been writing about for years in social media and in her newsletter The Gulp – her obsession with wheeled sport! This time the focus is on “Beer and Cyclocross in Belgium and The Netherlands”:

Near the startline of Namur’s citadel cyclocross course in Wallonian Belgium, two women with dark-dyed 80s bouffant mullets wander towards me, a beer apiece. It’s 10.30am. I take this as confirmation I really should be moving on from coffee by now. At a cyclocross race it’s not just Belgian culture and a sense of civic duty that keeps the pints coming. Beer has been essential to the sport since its inception thanks to local brewery sponsorship deals. Even now, podium finishers often receive beer-related prizes, whether that’s an oversized glass of locally-brewed blond, or a keg to take home. As a spectator, beer serves another important purpose.

Speaking of purpose – or perhaps lack thereof – I find this program allegedly aimed at deterring wrongdoing in the pubs of Wales a bit confusing:

The group – supported by North Wales Police and local publicans – work together to help tackle issues like anti-social behaviour to help keep workers and other guests safe. This week saw two people put forward for banning orders. It saw them both given five year banning notices from the pubs in the group. There are no details on the individuals or what they are alleged to have done.

I mean I think it’s a good idea but if you don’t know what earned these guys a five year ban… how are you going to avoid doing it yourself?  Speaking of the unexciting… yawn – but it’s still “craft”, right?

“We are entering 2025 as a stronger company focused on end-to-end execution which is showing progress in a dynamic operating environment…”

Perhaps conversely – and more realistically – Jessica Mason reported this week on a forecasted further downturn for the US beer market:

…the BPI is a net-rising index and a leading indicator of industry performance based on survey responses from participating beer purchasers.” Jones explained that “the index surveys beer distributors’ purchases across different segments and compares them to that of previous years’ purchases”. According to Jones: “A reading greater than 50 indicates the segment is expanding, while a reading below 50 indicates the segment is contracting.” Jones revealed that “overall BPI fell to 35 (a 14-point year-over-year shift) while the at-risk inventory measure rose to 53”… “The index for imports continues to point to expanding volumes with a February 2025 reading of 55; however, that is 13-points lower than the February 2024 reading of 68,” he warned.

Finally – and not buying into that trend at all – Boak and Bailey were out on another rip this past weekend and in the update at Patreon page identified another way of managing low alc beer:

We also took the opportunity to try Proper Job 0.5 for the first time. It’s clean and has an appealing hop profile, as you’d expect, but it’s not quite enough to conceal that it’s a low alcohol beer. For us, Clear Head from Bristol Beer Factory probably still has the edge as it manages somehow to have a fuller mouthfeel. However, as we suspected, interesting things start happening when you mix the 0.5 with, er, proper Proper Job. A 50/50 blend is pretty satisfying; lighter and more gulpable than the full-on PJ, but with enough Proper Job character to convince. Petit Proper Job, if you will.

Interesting – and it’s always good to give that “but… the brewer’s intentions?!?!” stuff a good kick down the stairs and try out your own ideas.

Fine. I did have plenty of stories about the crisis… but as promised I didn’t put much thought into it! Aaaannnnd… that is it for this week. Remember – however bad it was this week it will be worst next week. In the interim, please check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan going strong again each and every Monday. Then listen to Lew’s podcast and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on the (sometimes even but never) odd Fridays. And maybe The British Food History Podcast. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. The Share looks to be back with a revival. Ben’s Beer and Badword is out there with the all the sweary Mary! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? Check out the Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good and they are revving up for a new year. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. VinePair packed in Taplines as well. All gone. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer featuring… Michigan! There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too.  All About Beer has sponsored trade possy podcasts and there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s one cost a fifth of that – but only had the one post. Such is life.