Beer Writing – Page 3 – A Good Beer Blog

The Thursday Beery News Notes For Your “Summer’s One Third Over” Warning

Whether calculated by the two summer months of July and August or the astrological summer from solstice to equinox, today pretty marks the ending of the first third. This is your two-thirds of summer warning. WEEEEEEEET!!! Remember, you can still plant seeds in patio pots or right into the ground as you will eat vegetables in September, too. A great time to pick up stuff on discount, too, in prep for garden 2024. And it’s still all good foreplay for a good cold beer, believe me. Or a G+T… if you have the tonic. Hauling seed packets around is tiring thirsty work. Lordy.

What else is going on? Russian proved the value of the loyalty Carlsberg offered this week. As careful readers will recall, last February I broke the news… reported… err, repeated the story that the Danish brewery was seeking ways to re-enter the Russian market despite the issue of its ongoing genocidal invasion of the Ukraine. This week?

Carlsberg said it had not received “any official information from the Russian authorities regarding the presidential decree of the consequences for Baltika Breweries”. The Danish brewer also said it had completed an “extensive process” to separate the Russian unit from the rest of the company. Last month, the company signed an agreement to sell Baltika Breweries but had not yet completed the deal. “Following the presidential decree, the prospects for this sales process are now highly uncertain,” it added.

Ruh-roh. And in the most recent edition of London Beer City, Will Hawkes shared these interesting observations on the state of beer in and amongst the restaurant trade in London:

What is clear is that beer in restaurants has settled into a post-craft rut over the past half-decade, pre- and post-Covid. Restaurants, in the main, want just three beers: lager (the house option), pale ale and one more. The paler and crisper the better. Bottles are preferred, although 330ml cans work – but not 440ml, as Biercraft discovered when Pressure Drop moved to that format, and demand from restaurants plummeted.

Remember those beer dinners and those experts in pairing? What are they experts in now? Speaking of the unreal, Ron vented about one of the fibs of the brewing trade today, the debasedment of IPA as a term:

If there’s a beer style that pisses me of, it’s English IPA. Because it only has the most tenuous connection to any beers brewed in the UK bearing the name. In reality, it’s a recerse-engineerd American IPA, with tweaks to make it English. Basically, reducing the hopping or using English hops. And not based on IPAs brewed in the UK at all. 1.050º to 1.075º, 5% to 7.5% ABV, is what the BJCP guidelines say the strength should be. How many examples do I have that fit those parameters? Not one, either bottled or draught. Though the classic one, Red Triangle/White Shield, is missing. Though, at 1052º, even that only just scrapes in. What do the three draught beers called IPA have in common? Bugger all.

It is true. Needy US craft has poached so much of the terminology in its scrambling to pretend the whole ftuit sauced makey-uppy has some connection to brewing traditions. Who is to blame? Who suffers when business decisions backfire? Other than Ron, I mean. Back to a greater reality-based reality, British railroading news from Martin this week:

I can tell you now that drinking beer (or coffee) before boarding ANY train in 2023 is a very bad idea, as the tw*t who was reluctant to let folk sit on an empty chair housing his coat (tw*t) found when he attempted to get to the loo as we crawled past Burton at about 7mph. What is up with trains these days ? They’re all either cancelled or late or squeeze you in like sardines. Sardines who have paid for the privilege.

And in all that unhappiness we add the news that Katie (and Tom) Mather’s hugely optimistic project Corto is closing due to bigger realities than they could have imagined facing:

It has grown into a community hub, where local artists could showcase their work and regular live music nights and events would take place. The couple say they are “extremely proud” to have realised their vison to open their “ideal bar. But in a heartbreaking statement on social media, they say “times have never been harder” than over the past six months of “increasing costs and shrinking turnover”. “We knew the bar was never going to make us rich, but that wasn’t the point,” the statement added. “People have less money now and we understand this. Sadly, we won’t be the only people in this position….”

Glad, then, to have been able to support them in a small way at a trans-Atlantic distance with my now even more cherished cool t-shirt and warm wooly hat. A happier if less serious reality was discussed in The Growler this week, the question of foam and the LUKR faucet:

If we dissect the faucet body, we can observe that it is formed by a nozzle, a mesh, and a longer faucet, making this part effortless to disassemble and clean. The body has an additional part before the shank that will regulate beer flow, called a kompensator. Finally, the handle acquires another dimension because it is tuneable and has a side-pull one with 180-degree freedom of movement. This feature frees the Tapster to control the amount of beer being poured, triggering the ability to try new flavours and textures in foam serving.

Yum. Even if the adjectival cheese is a bit ripe. Speaking of ripe, The Beer Nut had an unhappy experience lately and shared his feelings:

… it’s not a good lager at all, leaning too far in to the rustic farmhouse thing, except without the charm. Were it a home brew I’d be suggesting its maker do something about fermentation temperature before attempting anything else similar. Since it’s not I’ll just say thanks but no thanks.

Note: I didn’t know it was possible to out-newbie the newbie guides but someone found a way. Buy in a good store. Got it. Here’s an actual news flash… beer is going out of style in some stores in Canada:

A trip to a grocery store in Toronto for your favourite wine or beer could leave you empty-handed. That’s because a handful of grocers in the city have quietly stopped selling alcohol due to rising levels of theft and razor-thin margins. “It’s really becoming unmanageable and getting out of hand. And so some grocers have taken the decision to remove these products from their shelves,” Retail Council of Canada spokesperson Michelle Wasylyshen told CTV News Toronto.

That’s sort of amazing if you ask me. Never thought that it was a matter of the wrong location for the market. And, you know, I wish there was an urban winemaker like this in my town who could come and deal with the mess of my tiny vineyard to add to their vats. This week’s Pellicle article by Paddy Gardiner features someone doing something like that but not much like that in London:

I think we never want to be 100% English, but we’d like to do more and more. That said, my argument around the sustainability side of bringing fruit in is that we only use road transport and ferries, we don’t use any air freight. We only bring in fresh bunches of grapes in reusable crates. The only impact carbon footprint-wise is the journey from the vineyard. The truth is that any wine that you buy from outside of the UK will have travelled that journey, but usually in a heavy glass bottle, and often rerouted around various storage facilities and distributors. If you eat or drink anything you haven’t grown yourself, then it has to have travelled. Then it’s about minimising impact, which [for us] looks like reusable crates and only using road transport.

Speaking of wine journalism, the slow death of The Montreal Gazette sees the conclusion of the 16 year run of Bill Zacharkiw‘s wine column, one that he celebrated with the republication on a favourite column – the pairing of wine and… ketchup:

I do know that after years of eating the stuff, ketchup is problematic for wine. It is both sweet and vinegary, and can have a decidedly herbal, earthy edge. Its powerful flavour tends to dominate whatever you are eating or drinking… What was a bit shocking was how many of the wines actually tasted bad with ketchup. I have done dozens of food- and wine-pairing trials and rarely have I seen good wines turn absolutely undrinkable when paired with something. Well, this is what happened.

Boom! And, speaking of which, Stan dropped the mic on the Anchor closing that sucked a lot of the fresh air out of the room:

…you’ve probably read enough already (including the stories I would link to), so I will simply point to one about the property the brewer is sitting on.

Gary also shared his thoughts which I’m largely in agreement with:

In the end Anchor mattered because it made beer people wanted – not because it gave expression to American myth, or was a counter-culture hero. Maytag, scion of the famous washing machine family, especially was never that. Yes, Anchor resonated for years as the little brewery that could. It played off that image for a long time, but image and reality are different things.

Yup. It’s been a little wicked watching folk get things wrong* about the brewery in their respective obituaries and elegies, laced with what is really a form of commercial propaganda. It was not actually the oldest craft brewery. It did not revive porter in the US. And it was propped up by significant Maytag money in the first decade. And, as the press release says, “…there’s still a chance another buyer might emerge during the liquidations process…” which is now in place. As I say, it’s good to let the fresh air in and get all this out to set the record straight.**

Finally and somewhat related to the airing of things, Boak and Bailey asked an odd but perhaps timely question this past week. And The Tand Himself gave the culturally appropriate Scottish*** “how’s yer bowels?” obsessed answer. [Ed.: …shivvers…]

There. Once again, that’s it! There’s a lot of different forms of negativity around this week. These are those times it seems. As per, you can check out the many ways to connect even including at my new cool Threads presence @agoodbeerblog. Have you checked out Threads? They appear to achieved to make social media offer less and less. Brilliant but I never got IG either. Don’t forget theose voices on Mastodon, the newer ones noted in bold:

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

*I’ve never seen so many slappy-backy semi-starving semi-pro newsletter jockeys in the small citation circle eagerly rushing to get a bit of brewing industry news so wrong as was seen this week. I have no idea what this even means: “…So many craft breweries exist because of Anchor“… given, you know, how no one followed the business model. At all. Interestingly, GBH never mentioned the whole affair, preferring to “break” the news about, what, the hard kombucha market? How long will it be before “beer” quietly slips out of that organ’s name as it wanders away?
**You know, if another failing brewery instead of Anchor had been bought by a silver spooner, another that sold 600 barrels p.a. of soured beer in the mid-1960s, no one really would have noticed Anchor slip away under back then with all the others that died off in that wave of industry rationalizations. But if you tell the younger folk that these days and, well…
***ma peeps so…

The “It’s Canada Day Down Canada Way” Edition Of The Beery News Notes

It’s that special time of year, the middle of the year, when those two guy up there often reappear. It’s Canada Day week. I can’t be sure when they first appeared on this here blog but nine years ago I said it was nine years before that. Back then I was writing political posts on the now merged blog Gen X at 40* and I had a whole schtick in 2005 about a future where the Maritime Provinces of Canada was working towards breaking away to be an independent nation based on graft and hydrofoil ferry services. The identity of these two gents is lost to time or at least just lost to my mind so if it is you say hello! And remember… for all your Canadian beer news read Canadian Beer News!!

Top beer news of the week from the land of canoes and maple syrup? Toronto municipal bureaucracy!

The proposed pilot, which will be considered by the Economic and Community Development Committee on July 6, comes after city council directed staff to create a pilot program last month to allow residents to drink in select public parks this summer. If approved, recommendations will go to city council July 19. The program would run from Aug. 2 until Oct. 9 and allow people aged 19 and older to drink alcohol in 20 city-owned parks in neighbourhoods where local councillors chose to opt in. Toronto councillors had the option to opt out of the program entirely, making parks in their area off-limits when it comes to drinking in public.

You know, we are not so much prudish in Canada as waiting for our grade four teacher to come back into the class to tell us what to do next. Consider the approach of our Commonwealth sibling Australia in this regard on a similar issue:

No worries about spectators getting a beer at the stadium when Australia hosts the 2032 Olympics. “We’ll serve a beer because we can,” Brisbane organizing committee president Andrew Liveris said Wednesday when asked about an alcohol prohibition for ordinary fans at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

In Commonwealth HQ, Boak and Bailey published** a magnificient piece of work entitled “Henekey’s Long Bar and the birth of the pub chain” – effectively an addendum to their excellent 2017 book 20th Century Pub. The story neatly begins are the beginning:

The building was probably built in the 17th century, although a plaque on the site claims there was a pub there from 1430. It was originally called The Queen’s Head Tavern or, in later years, The Queen’s Head Coffeehouse (“Frequented by professional gentlemen”). Under Henekey it came to be known as The Gray’s Inn Wine Establishment. After Henekey died in 1838, at the age of 55, the wine importing business carried on under his name. There were, however, no Henekeys involved in its running and his son, George Henekey Jr, actually set up a rival business right across the road.

PRESSES PAUSED!!!: puzzling Pompeii painting portraying possible pizza published!!

Mark LaFaro wrote quite a good but heavy piece for GBH*** this week on the topic that I had hoped I would see in October 2022, a discussion of the craft beer and drinks trade and the dangers of alcoholism:

Our experiences are not uncommon. Examples like this made it clear from the start of my career there was an ongoing pressure to try to “fit in” culturally in the alcohol industry, which meant honing a coveted skill of being able to drink heavily but still function. So, I drank. Hard. I got extraordinarily good at skirting that line between being a party animal and a professional. As my career and reputation grew, so did my alcohol tolerance.

While we are at it, Afro.Beer.Chick shared her thoughts on the progress of DEI initiatives in craft beer this week at exhibits A, B, C, D, E and…

History corner time. Here to the left (my right) is a lovely bit of brewery record, a rough estimate of profit for 1896 for Rose’s Old Brewery at Malton, England. Click and have a look. Over 100% profit on the sale of XX ales at their tied houses. Approaching 150% profit on XXXX ales. Reminds me of when I bought Sam Adams shares back around 2001 to get their annual financial disclosures. Stunning profitability in beer during good times if it is done sensibly.

Now I know what goes into a new sort of Mexican lager to make them extra special:

Mexican entrepreneurs are using crickets to supplement barley in beer… La Grilla beer is being tested out in small batches in Querétaro by a local craft brewery and a company that makes gluten-free and bread products using insects. The creators wanted to prove that insects can become part of our diet even in drinks while maintaining taste…

I saw Chris Dyson’s blog pass by my newsfeed and liked this piece about Ilkley of Wharfedale in Yorkshire especially for the great level of detail:

Not far down was Bar T’at, a modern bar run by Market Town Taverns. Here there was a good range of beers on cask and keg and the welcoming, effusive lady behind the bar immediately approached to ask me what I would like. From the available cask, I went for a pint of Kirkstall Three Swords, which I have found is always a good bellwether pint when in somewhere new. The bar, which you enter via a mini flight of stairs, is split in two, with the bar itself to the right as you go in from the road, with an adjoining room with seating, which is where I went. There is an additional room below, whilst outside is an area with several tables alongside the car park of a shopping centre. The beer was pretty good, a decent NBSS 3, but I had spotted a beer from Bini Brew Co on the board, so once the Three Swords was no more, I ordered a half of their 4.3% hazy pale Under the Manhole Cover from the keg list. Now I was interested because…

There is more. Speaking of more, Stan unpacked an aspect of the ripples passing through the US craft malting trade after Skagit Valley Malt closed its doors (as mentioned hereabouts last week and discussed in detail here, here and here) and shared one maltster’s sensible caution:

What I have come to terms with is that the financing play for expansion has to jive with malt house aspirations, not the other way around. Letting the needs and requirements of the financing terms influence our goals or take undue risks is simply too reckless for me. In short, unwise ego-driven aspirations need to be replaced with modest, incremental growth strategies utilizing myriad funding options all at the same time (private capital, bank, community rounds, government program funding, and organic). It takes forever because in funding an agriculture-based business you immediately go from an ocean of financing options to a hot tub of very hard to find slow-money-minded investment partners. While customer demand is there, trying to service all of it immediately doesn’t necessarily make financial sense.

Speaking on the processes of brewing, Ed of the excellently named Ed’s Beer Spot is/was in Plzeň at the Plzeňský Prazdroj from whence he reported the following:

Next we went to see the filters. They have a kieselguhr candle filter and two 72 module cross flow filters which filter 600hl/hr of high gravity beer down to 0.45 micrometres. The filter modules are changed after 400 CIPs. Pentair is paid a fee for them by hl filtered. The cross flow filters are better quality than the kieselguhr filter but cost more.

Frankly, I think he just makes this stuff up.

Neat bit of writing this week by ATJ on his Substack site ATJbeerpubs:

Beyond, the view looked out onto lush green fields, cows the colour of dark caramel moving ever so slowly as if in a bovine trance, while behind me voices chorused from tables, and a noisy cock blackbird dashed across my nearer vision and fixed itself on a branch in a luxuriantly leafed tree. I wondered if this is a view that Dave ‘Woody’ Woodward saw when he sat he, for obviously this was a favourite spot of his for on the wooden bench his name and 1943-2006 was engraved alongside the words ‘He loved to sit on this bench’.****

And there was a lovely bit of lighter writing by Martin Flynn at Pellicle this week on the more… err… physically active part of pub life, the crawl, which includes this keen observation:

Personally, I believe crawls are best served in winter. That rush of warmth on entering a pub hits even stronger when it replaces the cheek-tingling air of a December evening. There’s also something lovely about meeting friends in the day, then emerging from your latest stop to see dusk has cloaked the rooftops and the streetlights have started their shift. That visible change bolsters the sense of setting aside time for people you care about: since you met up, nobody’s glanced at the clock.

Ah, the romance of being an international beer judge: stuck on a train station platform unable to get to the event, cold boxed pizza for dinner if you do get yourself there!

Finally, not much to say about the mutiny not mutiny in Russia last weekend except that I saw this totally clickable image from early Saturday morning from Rostov which now captures the whole thing for me. A bleary guy in sandles looking like he’s out for his first coffee, standing mere feet away from a soldier, both probably thinking WTF. Note: sandles guy is not actually at the front which is just a handful of kilometers away. Note as well: the one Russian with the gun is trying to establish a fairer more effective system for running the war against Ukraine but he is next to a guy doing very well by the fact that the soldiers at the front are mainly conscripted from the non-Russian parts of the Russian Federation.

One last thing! Thanks to reader jordan b. who liked this personal favourite of mine from last week:

There was something strangely pleasing about the juxtaposition of “bag of cans” and “all-you-can-puke prosecco”.

There. That’s it! I’m all over the place this week. Smoke’s back but just for a day or so they say. Which means I am not – after I type these last few words- going to attempt to throw my back out this Wednesday evening to make a tomato plant happy. I’ve a long weekend coming up for that. Strains by 10:45 am guaranteed. As for beer news, it’s now back to you all as always. Talk amongst yourselves. Write something. Something for me to read. And then write about. And also as per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon, the newer ones noted in bold:

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

*all preserved at the Wayback Machine for your reading pleasure.
**And they gave up a nice Saturday for you ungrateful folk!!!
***Slightly undermined for the regular weak kneed editorial function of making sure it’s clear that not everyone in website HQ is entirely comfortable with the actual story or an actual quote: “…John Carruthers, director of communications at Revolution, highlights that the company has policies in place to protect the health and safety of employees. “Beer is a social beverage and naturally a lot of fun can come out of that,” he says, “and that’s why one of our highest priorities is making sure our team has fun in a responsible manner…” ” What is the point of adding that?
****Channelling a bit of the old Thomas Grey if you ask me… which you didn’t…
*****And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. The Fizz died in 2019. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

This Week’s Beery News Notes Are Fraught With All That A Thursday Might Entail

What a week. I spend the week’s few forecasted dry sunny hours on Tuesday evening hands on knees with this newly acquired handy friend indeed clearing out a patch invaded by raspberries and catnip about seven by ten foot to move some of the tomato plants into. I wanted to lay down and weep by the end me being an old guy and all but it’s got to be done. It’s really getting out of hand out there. I have a pot problem. Bought another six to fill Monday night just in case. “Just in case of what exactly?” I later thought. Seventeen zucchini seeds hit the soil on Saturday and pole beans were added on Sunday too, as illustrated. Who is going to eat all this other than the bugs and birds?

Where to begin this week? There’s a lot so perhaps at the outset just a summary of the endsy timesy news of the week. The spokesperson for the BA actually used the phrase “craft slowdown” this week. Mirrors perhaps the excellently honest new B+B tag for these times: “the age of divestment“! We learned this week, as Stan noted, “stunning is the news” that Anchor‘s beer will be far less common a sight. We also heard (as I dutifully discussed back in late April) that things are not going so well financially at BrewDog as the Morning Advertiser shared:

BrewDog has reported an operating loss of £24m in its latest trading update… which BrewDog founder James Watt attributes to the cost of investing in the brand, its people and its bars, alongside the “devistating” increase in input costs.

All of which unnervingly indicates that the losses were due to making less money than they spending on, you know, their core activities. All of which leads me to wonder if an ebbing tide lowers all boats. Not yet here in Canada where there was a very sensible bit of consolidation as reported by the clever folk behind the Canadian National Beer News Service, a branch of the Department of The North:

Corby Spirit and Wine Limited has announced that it is set to purchase Ace Beverage Group, parent company of Ace Hill Beer and several other beverage alcohol brands, including Cottage Springs and Cabana Coast ready-to-drink cocktails, Liberty Village cider, and Good Vines wine spritzers. The transaction will see Corby acquiring 90% of Ace’s shares for $148.5 million, with call options on the remaining shares that can be exercised in 2025 and 2028.

That’s real money but apparently the beer assets is one of the least attractive part of the deal. Despite its ongoing move to be about less beer hunting, there was an similar tale told about Ninkasi Brewing in GBH. More good beer settling in as just a part of a portfolio.

Settling. Phil of the excellently named Oh Good Ale in a post also excellently named as “Toil and Trouble“* wrote about a survey retaken after ten years, a repeated of a 2013 census of sorts studying pubs, breweries and cask ale in one part of Manchester England, Chorlton, and had surprising results:

What’s changed? Well, many things have changed – I’m comparing April with June, apart from anything else, so it may possibly be that some of those bars were running dry due to warm-weather demand. Other than that, I was expecting to see little change among the (seven) bars of 2013 – six of them still are bars, after all – and carnage among the (22) breweries, but if anything it was the other way round. As far as I can make out, only three of the 22 breweries have closed outright…

What he found had changed was in the pubs, that the range of service had retracted leading him to state that “the cask bubble in Chorlton and environs has pretty well burst” leading in turn the Tand himself to comment:

…leaving cask to those that handle it well is good policy and the points about addressing a mixture of beer expert and cheapskate are well made.

So perhaps not so much a burst bubble as enthusiasms becoming cammed doon. No, craft is not to blame as it is retracting too. It’s all just a bit of balancing out.

Lisa is not settling. She has scouted out another weird pub for her guide to Dublin starting with this appealing intro:

I must admit, the immediate vicinity of this week’s pub is something I typically speed through as quickly as possibly – the visual clutter from its side of Westmoreland Street is not the most inviting vista, featuring, as it does, the National Wax Museum (NATIONAL WAX MUSEUM), lots of plastic major-brand logos, and CCT Dublin’s building in that block must be one of the worst insults to architecture in any European capital (and I have a soft spot for a lot of ‘ugly’ kinda-Brutalist buildings, but this…is not that).

Beet beer is in the news care of Pellicle (and it’s a favourite of mine given we have year round access to my nearby neighbours’ MacKinnon Bros Red Fox Ale which is made with good Ontario root veg):

Given all these strengths, I asked the brewers why they thought beets weren’t a more common beer addition, especially given the great diversity of fruits and other adjunct ingredients brewers are experimenting with these days. Part of it, of course, is that beets are just a contentious food. Todd, for his part, doesn’t find it terribly surprising that so few brewers have touched beetroot. “I recently saw a meme about fast food variety, and it just showed fried chicken sammies from every chain. That is basically craft beer right now, but sub in hazy IPA/kettle sour. Yes, there is a lot being added to beer these days but I would say that it isn’t really experimental, or very courageous,” Todd says. “For real, no shade over here, but the ingredients people are using could be mistaken for a candy shop or ice cream parlour.”

I like that… because if ye’ve no eaten your veg you cannie hae any puddin!

A fitting obituary for a great rugby player and beer man, Paul Rendall:

He would often proclaim Nunc est bibendum. For those old team-mates who had not studied Latin, he would explain, in the bar, of course, that now it is time to drink.

Drinks Business had a great piece this week unpacking more about that waste water beer building that I mentioned a month ago in San Fran:

In an experiment, Epic fed wastewater from a large San Francisco apartment block through “ultrafiltration membranes” 100 times thinner than a human air. They filter out impurities and the cleaned water is then disinfected by using ultra-violet light. Tartakovsky told CNBC this process is comparable with the biology that takes place in the human stomach. And seemingly it works. He claimed that independent testing of Epic’s cleaned water shows it meets US Federal standards for drinking water and often exceeds them. Cleaned water was passed to Devil’s Canyon Brewing Co in San Carlos California, which produced the Epic OneWater Brew.

What else is out there in the world? Well, The Beer Nut continued his wandering ways and has reported on a trip in May to Haarlem in The Netherlands and found a lack of wallop:

While I’m used to the Dutch people’s effortless fluency in English, I’m not sure that Black It Up! was a great name for the beer. Echoes of Zwarte Piet linger there. I liked the tarry bitterness in the aroma here, presented with a little black pepper spice. It was unfortunately rather more ordinary to taste: dry and roasty with only a token treacle effect to thicken and sweeten it, and no proper hop wallop. I feel that something of this nature should be delivering wallop aplenty; instead this is calm, restrained and frankly a bit boring. Oh well.

Sounds a bit like me. Anyway, speaking of The Netherlands, Ron has been in Vietnam revealing all on the breakfasts to be found near the lobby among other things. And, elsewhere, Stan is reporting from the hop fields again, with his jam packed June 2023 edition of Hop Queries now out. This month we learn that:

Friday the USDA forecast hop acreage strung for harvest in 2023 in the Northwest will be down 8%, or 5,067 acres, from 2023. That’s only about half of the reduction John I. Haas CEO Alex Barth told those attending the American Hop Convention is necessary to begin to get American hop supply and demand back in balance. More likely will be needed… Because general agreement is that the alpha market is in balance, that means the reduction must come from varieties valued first for their aroma and flavor. In fact, farmers added more than 2,500 alpha acres (primarily +1,960 CTZ and +555 Pahto), and aroma acreage was down more than 7,500.

The fabulousness that Stan brings is rooted in the shameless presentation of hop production as agriculture. Fact fact factity fact. You might as well be reading reports from an early US ag societies studying barley growth over 200 years ago. It is all a continuum of knowledge development that sits as a counterpoint to the sorts of approaches to appreciation that startle one with their admitted limitations:

…there’s nothing wrong with mystery, I try to use it when I can for if you stuck to the plain facts with beer you would have writing on a par with that covering the drainage industry or the world of pallets

Speaking of facts, we had a wonderful bit of pushback published this week by a very unhappy investor in the now restructuring Black Sheep Brewery, one of England’s longest serving micros. See, as noted in my May 4th editon of these my scribbles, when everyone cheered Hooray! at the idea it was not shutting so much as getting its affairs in better order we must remember that one of the realities when a firm goes into administration is that the necessary new money may well have to bump away a lot of the old. As we are told is happening in this case:

Long before Covid, when interest rates were at all-time lows and trading conditions were relatively benign, I clearly identified the coming apocalypse, and tried to spell out to those few of you who would listen that “The End was nigh”. Back then, there was still an opportunity to raise new equity, properly invest in our brand, arrange for regulatory accreditation of the packaging plant, smell the coffee, or rather understand where national beer consumption, and indeed alcohol, trends were heading, and to truly “Build a better Black Sheep”. My prescient web-site spelled it all out for you.

The piece goes on to name names and point pointed fingers. I expect the law will be applied appropriately.

Not dissimilarly in terms of a daring do done, I was surprised in a very familiar way by the wild eyed responses to the excellent opinion piece published by Pellicle this week. An editorial. Now, right up front we have to be clear – good beer is no place for forming and certainly no place for sharing opinions or editorials so it is fair that it created a sort of confusion in the hearts of many. Don’t worry. It’s just like that feeling you felt when you saw a small dog in bright yellow rain boots for the first time. Odd but it actually works.

And what was the problem? What upset the universe? Well, if you really want to know, this is the sort of vile sprew that society faced when it woke on Monday morning:

I respect the importance of linking beer back to its agriculture—in fact this is something I feel personally invested in—but this is not the same thing as terroir. Beer is not merely a representation of the land from where its ingredients came, and to advertise it as such underplays the significance inherent to the production of both beer itself, and its individual raw materials.

Good Lord! The gall of the man!! See… see… err… well, that actually all makes fairly perfect sense doesn’t it. Hardly an opinion at all. Most agreed. It’s practically cheery out there. Yet… we are faced with three sorts of minor rebuke (aside from the usual scoffy self-satisfied crab bucketeers in the corner): (i) “Wrong!” (ii) “Clickbait!!” and (iii) you have to appreciate that to be an expert you need to understand that nothing means anything so trying to explain stuff is pointless… as well as combinations of that trio of top notch beer writing principles right there. We are, as always, formed and framed by our weaknesses more than our strengths.

Stan shared a well considerd counterpiece supporting the use of terrior in relation to beer. Read the whole thing but here is the nub:

I became more comfortable with the word as I researched “For the Love of Hops” and continued with “Brewing Local,” although I continue to prefer “taste of place.” Amy Trubek concludes “The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey Into Terroir,” an absolutely terrific book, by writing “ . . . the taste of place exists, as long as it matters.” To repeat myself, I’m more inclined to use the words taste of place opposed to terroir, but I’m fine with “beer terroir exists, as long as it matters.” Both matter to me.

That works, too. For me? A bit of this has always been the way. There is a simmering desire in beer writing for the shortcutting convenience that making X mean Y brings. The extrapolation slipped in here or there. And there is no X that is more attractive to beer culture as a Y construct than a well grounded principle from the much more established world of wine. So, we have a slightly wonky beer styles construct because wine has naturally developed styles. And we have mildly informative beer atlases mainly because wine legend Hugh Johnson made an excellent one about wine that has been regularly updated.** Just recently Garrett Oliver illustrated this tension (and perhaps even envy) recently when he wrote:

We sometimes forget that the projection of meaning is WORK. Hard work. The wine industry does that work. The beer industry, by and large, does not. This is one reason why wine and spirits are eating our lunch, especially in the US.

And the results and the dear are real. At least here in Canada, where we have moved from a marketplace where (i) in 2002, beer had a market share of 50 per cent by dollar value, while wine had 24 per cent to one (ii) to 2012, to one with a 44 per cent beer to 31 percent wine ratio and (iii) by 2022, we have a 34.9% beer to 31.3% wine. There is cause for concern.

Hmm. What does it mean and where does it all take us? I like this take by T-Rex to my left, your right. And little while ago, Jeff wrote very sensibly how a technique is not a style. Similarly, things can only bend so far and we need to agree that terroir is not defined by a technique. Technique is not terroir. A yeast strain that’s been transported world wide as terroir? Nope. That’s all square-holery-round peggishness to me. Works for you? Fine… but it’s utterly unnecessary and may undermine things. Don’t get me wrong. I have been into good wine for as long or longer than I have liked good beer. I have even tended to my own vineyards in two provinces, mainly to the delight of birds. For my money, the two trades deserve to return to their largely separate and well-defined lexicons if anything is to be understood in itself. Ditch the code and, as Matt wrote, all that it is covering up. Clarity avoids confusion. Get at that, please. Yes, you. The problem is… I am not sure how much of beer writing is meant to do that, if it is meant to make things clearer to the beer buying public.*** There is comfort in mystery apparently. And, in a world where some of the expertise is based on hanging out one’s own shingle or … where one has little else, well… one has to protect one’s reputation. Doesn’t one.

Finally and just perhaps unrelatedly, I have a hard time getting my head around the idea that the Nigerian non-alcoholic beer market is worth 6.2 billion USD when the same article states:

BusinessDay’s findings showed the firm incurred a loss of N10.72 billion in the first quarter of 2023 from N13.61 billion in the same period of 2022. The firm’s net revenue amounted to N123.31 billion in the first quarter of 2023, a 10.5 percent decline from N137.77 billion in the comparable period. “Despite challenges, the opportunities in the coming decades for non-alcoholic beers are quite as substantial. That is a prospect worth drinking to,” John said.

Worth nothing that the collapsing Nigerian Naira is currently worth 0.0021 USD and, as the same article states, roughly 50 percent of Nigeria’s brewing input costs is imported.

That’s it! That’s enough from me. I need to save my strength for the allotment my house now sits in. Back to you for now as always. And as per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon, the newer ones noted in bold:

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

*Here you go. Here’s the reference.
**When the fam says “What? Why?” when I pull out a bottle of something tasty, I pull out my atlas, point at a patch of a few hundred square metres and say “From that field right there!“
***See, if you see nuance or complex or subtle being used to point at things that are merely specific or one part of a long list, just as with “mystery” as cited above, you might be in the doldrums of such conditions. Hanging out with engineers taught me this. Engineers are the heroes of the lengthy sensible to do list. Put things on it when you think of them and strike them off when they get done. Build a few bridges and you learn this sort of thing.
****And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. The Fizz died in 2019. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For The Greatest Week Of The Year

Can you believe late May and early June? I was so caught up with the darling buds of May on Tuesday morning, I even posted a third of this two days early. Significantly… no one cared. Anyway, that’s the life of a blogger two decades in. No time to fret. Summer is coming on soon. Last weekend, I got out the big hat and the SPF 50 and partook of a bit of rugger spectating and – I say I say – I shall do so again this week. Wha-hey! Look at that action. The eastern Ontario league games are free and, as you can see, the seats are good… as long as you remember to bring one. You don’t get as close as that gent in grey, mind you, but he was a linesman so there is that.

First up in beer – because there was no beer tent at the field of play – very interesting news from Evan Rail and the publication of an anthology of the best of his his beer writing.

…until now, the old “Why Beer Matters” was never available in print, just on Kindle. (Yes, there was a limited-edition letterpress edition, but that doesn’t count.) This new print + ebook edition was made with the amazing @vellum180g. It looks great, if I do say so myself.

Many of the pieces he has included in the book speak from that era of optimism about good beer that existed before the buy-outs, the murk, the scandals, the fruit sauces and the closings. Very worthwhile and all excellently written. Buy it here.

Speaking of putting it all together, Matty Matt Meister 3000 has published a tale in Pellicle this week, a tale of an apple named Discovery:

You couldn’t possibly make proper cider with eating apples, I thought… I have since learned when it comes to any alcoholic beverage, this breed of snobbery gets you absolutely nowhere—all drinks are valid and have their place, after all.* And some of the best cider in the world is made using sweet, deliciously succulent eating apples. Chief among them: the noble Discovery. First cultivated in 1949, Discovery’s story began when Essex fruit worker George Dummer planted pips taken from the Worcester Pearmain variety in his garden, thought to be pollinated by another variety called Beauty of Bath. The tale goes that the young tree was left unplanted, and was exposed to frost, with only a light sack covering for protection. Fortunately it survived, and eventually came to the attention of Suffolk nursery keeper Jack Matthews, who took grafts of the tree and continued to develop the variety.

Note: unlike all drinks, all apples are valid and do have their place. White Claw and glitter beer are crap and you can’t even turn that shit into compost.

Stats on the UK beer scene are something that Victim of Maths more than dabbles in as this week when he notes that off-trade booze prices have siggnificantly dragged behind inflation:

The latest UK inflation data shows that in spite of continuing high levels of price increases in food and non-alcoholic drinks, prices of shop-bought alcohol, particularly wine and spirits, have not risen at anything like the same rate… you could speculate a few reasons: 1) We produce a lot of it domestically 2) Perhaps ingredients less affected by price increases 3) Ability of retailers/producers to stockpile due to long shelf life 4) Used as a loss leader.

Staying in Britain, The Times published an article on calories and booze and shared this interesting bit of metabolic prioritization info:

“Unlike protein, carbohydrates and fats, alcohol cannot be stored in the liver,” says Eli Brecher, a registered nutritionist. “Drinking large quantities results in your body prioritising the breaking down of alcohol over its other duties such as burning calories and the result is that your metabolism slows and calorie-burning is less efficient.”

Across the Channel, Boak and Bailey have been to Paris and have identified some key tips to navigating its beer bars, tips like this:

You wouldn’t cut towards the bar to greet the staff in a branch of Wetherspoon, though, before finding a table. In France, we’ve found, people will do exactly that, effectively announcing their arrival, and getting (quiet, possibly unspoken) permission to take a seat… Of course we got it wrong at craft beer bar FauveParis at 49 Rue St Sabin on our way out to Italy, while we were still warming up. We then spent 30 minutes trying to win over the staff whose feelings we had hurt. They wouldn’t look at us, talk to us or crack a smile because, fair enough, we’d rudely walked in and failed to greet them before looking at the beer list.

Not dissimilarly except it’s elsewhere, Martin is on the road again, this time in Estonia and Latvia with a series of posts (along with the usual generous accompaniment of excellent photos) that also unpack what you might expect if you found yourself there and thirsty such as these two observations in Riga:

Across the church square was Banshee, a brand new craft bar and another pre-emptive tick, which seemed to specialise in orange murk, a change from the sour obsession in Tallinn… And the local specialties of dumplings and blood sausage were worth the calories, though an impulse late order of dried fish and squid was a step into Estonian authenticity too far.

Closer to home, a great bit of vid was posted this week from here in Ontario where two beer fans report on the limited joys of that regulatory loophole that allows a 7 Eleven convenience store to be deemed a restaurant that serves beer… as long as you don’t leave with it.

Odd story in GBH this week about efforts to undo US alcohol regulation related to category management and how the Brewer’s Association is going to submit something to the Federal regulaory body, the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau… but there’s not much input from either the Bureau or the Brewer’s Association:

“…that’s what the BA’s for. Maybe they bring on category management expertise to represent them regionally,” Fisher says. “Now you’d have a category manager who represents these 20 regional beer brands to help them with their business.” The BA declined to answer questions about what would fill the void left by category management, saying it is not speaking further about its comments to the TTB at this time. Brandt says that if the BA is going to put category management under the regulatory microscope, the trade organization should consider an alternative solution that it thinks would benefit its members. (This is a complex question, as some of the BA’s largest member breweries employ their own category managers.) “It would be really cool if they proposed an alternate method,” Brandt says. “Bring me a solution, not a problem, right?”

Not that complex at all. Just that once again, the Brewers Association has no solution what with its hands being tied by the big members… like their hands are tied in implementing EDI… or kicking out bad members, etc., etc., etc…

And I ran a poll this week and, as never before, people on Twitter responded. An exit poll of sorts, 305 nice folk… or maybe 105 folk and 200 bots shared their thoughts on why their interest in craft beer faded. These things aren’t interesting for any sort of overall result so much as the patterns. 11% found other nerdy hobbies, 20% moved away from craft’s culture but almost 70% expressed it’s too pricy or too much of the same experience – both of which speak to value. Then we look at the comments. “NEIPA” says Knut. “Same-ish says Andreas. “$20+ for a 4-pack I might not like makes the price not fine” says Andres. “Too many mediocre/bad quality offerings and a backlog of aged beer in retail” says Dan. “I am simply too old to drink things flavored with children’s cereal” says Kathleen. I likd that one particularly. Then… we also heard “a repetitive online culture that seems more invested in getting clout from strangers on the other side of the world” from Robin. “Gatekeepers” says Japhet and “deliberate antagonism towards those who like their beer from a cask” says Ben. And another Dan wrote: “…there is a lot of crappy performance beers (I call those that seem to have been brewed on a dare or a whim and are more like candy than beer) & it has dulled my interest in exploring.” Add growing up and getting more health conscious. Good comments. Not even all that cranky. Some folk just not as interested if they ever were.

By way of contrast, Stan wrote an interesting post about the residual interest in treating craft brewers like “rock stars” in the context of considering the new revised edition of The Complete Beer Course by Joshua Bernstein. This is an idea which, as Stan kindly noted, I have thought is utterly nutso for over 15 years. I am not alone. But, like those moving on surveyed above, the value decision in the other direction is still a real for some:

In 2023, Bernstein chose to include brewery workers like sensory scientist Rachel McKinney at Fremont Brewing and packaging manager Marcus Crabtree at Kings County Brewing Collective. “I really want to give a voice to these people that are in the industry and show people that beer is more than just one single person, that breweries are miniature factories and everybody has different roles, and getting that beer into your hand requires a lot of hard effort and a lot of [teamwork],” he said to Iseman. What does that mean for the exalted few? Tod and Cilurzo are in the index of the latest edition; Maier and Calagione are not (although Dogfish Head makes multiple appearances). Call it coincidence. Photos posted on Instagram from The Brewers Retreat this week prove, plenty of fans are still willing to pay to hang out with their brewing heroes.

Hero is a word tossed around a lot. And, like rock star, it is too often misplaced. If these be your rock stars, get to a few good concerts. And if these be your heroes, well, maybe time to go volunteer somewhere and find people quietly contributing to those in need with little fanfare. One aspect of this, of course, is that these labels are applied by writers and not the people themselves. Writers with a dictionary that might be a week bit too concise. Or maybe with an interest in plumping up a recycled tale within their chosen narrow area of focus. Still – is this enthusaism any less valid than those who choose to move on after losing the love? Probably not. As we were all so wisely told before… back in 1986.**

Note: “philly dive restrooms are nicer than most cities’ whole bars.”

That’s it! That’s enough from me. As per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon, the new ones noted in bold:

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

*Doubt it, Ralphie!!! For those not familiar with the ever excellent phrase “Doubt it, Ralphie” here is some background information.
**Winner of the 2023 Vacuous Conclusion Of The Year Award!
***And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. The Fizz died in 2019. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

Your Beery News Notes For Another Week Filled With Frosty Risks

Here we are. Mid-May and… the tomatoes have had to been covered and stuck in the shed for two nights. It was +0.7C Wednesday at 6 am and -1.0C on Thursday at about the same time. Lordy. BTW, I’ve hit 60 (as I have mentioned a number of times) so I plan to say “Lordy” more. Martin, who I suspect also says “Lordy” a lot, thumbed his nose to the fear of frost and spent some time at the seaside. Withernsea, to be exact. He spotted the same thing in real life that I did in his photos: “… the pub a minor joy with comfortable seating…” Now that I’m 60 I can say what I’ve known in my heart since I was a teen. Nothing like a comfy seat. Now, I know that this may not the sort of hard hitting beer journalism that you have come to expect hereabouts but I say it is beer realism. Happy butt, happy lad.

First up and not as happy, Lew made an interesting observation this week in his column at The Full Pint:

Failure might be on the way, because cost inputs in brewing have gone up and up, and people don’t want to see more price increases in the cooler. How can they not, when I hear from brewers about double-digit increases in packaging prices (glass, cans, kegs), 50% jumps in energy costs, and (finally) increases in labor costs. That’s why prices go up…mostly. But prices also go up sometimes because everyone’s waiting for the big brands – either in sales, or reputation and cachet – to go first, and when they do, everyone rushes to follow. That’s not collusion, they didn’t conspire to do it, it’s more like a stampede. When one buffalo starts running, pretty quickly they’re all running, because no one wants to get left behind.

It’s true that there’s price input pressure but there’s also the reality of sluggish interest in beer. Because, you know, people can run in any number of directions – including to straight to pouring other drinks in their glass. How many breweries are comfortable with the prospect of cutting output and raising prices?

Speaking of which, I had my first natural wine last weekend. My notes: “Yeasty, orange pear juice fruit, dry with light bubble and green pepper end with a little white pepper. Watery Creamsicle with mineral herb?” Perhaps not a repeat buy for me but interesting enough as experience goes. I only mention that (and not anything else like the name of the wine) as I read a piece in a newsletter called Everyday Drinking about how unpleasant natural wine fans are and I don’t want anyone showing up on my door:

Almost immediately, our natural winemaker launched into a rant. First, about the winemaker we’d just visited. “What is biodynamic anyway?” he said. “They can just buy the biodynamic preparations online.” This rant wasn’t surprising. There is possibly no group of people on earth who talk more shit about one another—behind one another’s back—than natural winemakers do. Plus, the biodynamic winemaker had already told us he’d once partnered with this guy and they’d had a “philosophical” falling out.

Yikes. Yet… is it true? Pellicle steps up to the defence of the naturalistas with a day in the life of an Australian harvest:

It is one of the rainiest seasons you’ve ever seen or heard of, and winemakers are anxiously racing against the threat of mildew and rot—the two inevitable results of rain falling on grapevines. Not to mention the birds and the kangaroos, constant predators of your fruits who find their ways past fences and through the netting, so much do they enjoy sucking the juice out of the berries or nibbling entire bunches.

Not at all unpleasantly, Eoghan guided us to an article in The Brussles Times about, what, appropriation of Belgium’s national drink by adulterous hegemonistic US craft:

The competition had a total of 24 “Belgian-style” beer categories, for which US beers took home most of the prizes. Canadian brewers also got more medals than Belgian ones for “Belgian-style” beers, receiving four prizes. “It’s been said that Belgian beer is having some difficulties on the international scene due to a lack of innovation. I think we are proving the opposite with our Seefbier, a beer style that dates back to 16th century Antwerp,” said Johan Van Dyck, founder of the Antwerp Brewing Company.

See also. Interesting use of “innovation” up there which leads us to Ron who suggests it’s a misuse and mislabelling of what is really just change:

True innovation in brewing is far rarer. Things like the adoption of the hydrometer and thermometer. Baudelot coolers. Refrigeration. Pure yeast cultures. Mash filters. Continuous fermentation. (It may have been a total disaster, but it was truly new.) Stuff that really hadn’t been done before. And genuinely transformed brewing. Most of what’s called innovation today? Mere tinkering with ingredients. While change is inevitable, it’s rarely innovation.

Speaking of which, I was there until the flavoured barrel-aging. Why can’t we respect the fundamentals? Speaking of which, the archeological record could support a Journal of Archaaeological Brewing but no one seems to want to do it.

Jeff posted a few thoughts about “innovative” collaborations in the land of good beer, a concept which long ago morphed from brewers getting together to beer writers getting their names on beer bottle labels to anytihng imaginable to… to… perhaps the unimaginable:

I may be an outlier here, but as a rule of thumb, I personally would never green-light a collab with any packaged meats product. No doubt some drinkers will cotton to the idea of a meaty brew, but are their numbers sufficient to offset those who gag at the idea? Put another way, one way to consider the potential harms and benefits of a potential collab is to ask whether people will confuse it with an April Fools joke. If the answer is even a maybe, it’s probably a poor opportunity.

And Cass posted an excellent update on the state of brewing in Syracuse, NY over at A Quick Beer:

Syracuse has an up-and-coming beer scene with many new breweries in a city that’s easy to explore. We enjoyed just a taste of Syracuse’s thriving beer scene, including pioneer Middle Ages, modern breweries such as Talking Cursive, Meier’s Creek, Buried Acorn and Bullfinch, plus checking out Syracuse’s Tipp Hill neighborhood and Seneca Street and SingleCut in nearby Manlius.

What that? NO, that’s just the blurb. He posted a video! Cass also runs the excellent (and perhaps older than this here space) The Bar Towel Forum for all your beer chatting needs. Speaking of which, the Craft Beer Channel has hit a decade of beers by video.

Health question: why does the congratulations around someone saying they are doing so well and feeling much healthier off the booze require also praising the person for also not recommending anyone else try it? Taboo?

Only tangentially related, Stan was having to be pretty blunt this week. His round up was only about the botch of a conference put on by the Brewers Association that I touched on that week – a botch which left him in less than a positive mood:

Last month I wrote, “It’s not my goal to find less pleasant stories to balance the feel good ones, but some weeks that is pretty easy.” There were stories last week that you might label “feel good,” but by the time the week ended nothing felt very good.

The Beer Nut made a few interesting observations about the state of BrewDog’s beer as well as the big surprise in beer for 2023, the battle for stout supremacy:

he first beer to catch my attention was Black Heart. BrewDog has been marketing this heavily as a Guinness substitute, and just like with Ansbach & Hobday’s London Black last year, I wanted to put that to the test. Unlike London Black, however, this one does actually meet the brief. They’ve matched the strength of Draught Guinness in Britain where it’s 4.1% ABV. They’ve got the texture spot on, while the flavour is very dry and rather boring, presenting an equivalent amount of toast and roast but lacking the tangy sourness which is Draught Guinness’s only real nod to having character. Mission accomplished, I guess, though BrewDog normally makes much more interesting beers than this. I would like to try them side by side if I ever get the chance.

David Jesudason (he of the BBC article on his new book, released yesterday) had an interesting article in his Substack newsletter Episodes of My Pub Life and prefaced it with this interesting heads up:

This article should be paid content. In fact, like last week’s article, it was commissioned but I chose to withdraw it from the publication as they wanted to change it too much from the initial brief. There’s no bad feeling about this decision and sometimes you have to value a compelling story above financial concerns.

Have I mentioned that gatekeeping backseat driving editors take away as much as they add? Oh, yes… many times. Anyway, the story is about two British people who ran a pub in rural South Africa from 2003 to 2011 and all the racist bigotries they experienced. Like everything David touches (except for some editors) you will find another read that few others are sharing in the beer world.

Lastly, the structure of this piece by Will Hawkes on Copenhagen illustrates something I notice about beer writing – a familiar structure. First, I like to count paragraphs and this one comes in at a bit under 30 paragraphs with about the first two thirds revisiting known facts. Even if in this case the facts are about negative things. Not a lot of beer writing is about negative things so this is good. And this is for VinePair so that context is important. This is not craft beer bubble writing. The “story” is in the last nine paragraphs and really the final five. The fifth even starts with an introductory sentence: “On a sunny evening, it’s clear that Copenhagen is a beer town.” Then a reference to hygge (that Pete Brown told us all about way back when in his 2006 book Three Sheets to the Wind which I interviewed him about when he was speaking to me.*) And then the final happy hopeful.

That’s it! That’s enough from me. As per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon:

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

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

A Doubtful Dubious Display Is What You Get With This Week’s Beery News Notes

Tra-laa! How many first posts in May have I “tra-laa-ed” at you? It is because I have no imagination? NO! It’s because it’s from the musical Camelot which earned 110% of it’s reputation to Canada’s greatest gift to world culture, Mr. Robert Goulet!!! Surely the handsomest man of the 20th century. And a clinker of a drink or two, as illustrated. What’s that got to do with beer? WHHHAAAATTTT??? Have you lost your marbles? First, he had a TV show called Blue Light which is obviously the inspiration for Blue Light. AND he did TV ads for Molson Canadian which was owned then (and are again) by the owners of the Montreal Canadiens at the time. Who were right in the middle of proving themselves as the greatest hockey team of all time. Tra. La.

First up this week, happy news as those purveyors of interesting stories, Pellicle, hit its fourth anniversary which by my fingers and toes makes it 20% of this here AGBB‘s longevity. There is a party this very evening or, if you are western hemispheric, this afternoon. You know, at work there is a portrait (like these) of Michael Flannagan, our fair city’s municipal clerk who was in office from the 1840s to the 1890s. If I retire in five years as might be normal I will have made it to what I call the half-Flannagan. In 12 years, Pellicle will half-Flannagan me. Happy news.

And by way of proving the point of their prominence, Pellicle posted a piece (Ed.: STOP IT!!!) on The Five Points Brewing Company, Hackney Downs railway arch, London and its dedication to the craft of cask – with some particularly proper beer pR0n photography (Ed.: STOP!!!!):

“Cask beer is the very definition of craft beer,” Ed says. “Some people can think of cask beer as something different from craft… that it’s boring, brown, British bitter, and craft beer is all about New World hops, and intense flavour experiences, and carbonation. But craft beer is actually about provenance and quality and artisanal approaches to manufacturing,” he adds. “And it’s not just about the manufacturing process, it’s the dispense process. It’s a living, breathing product that continues to condition in the cellar, and that is an art form in itself.”

Me, I can get into that idea of “provenance” way ahead of claims to terrior.

In the police blotter update, I am not sure if this new federal amending statute applies to this here place and whether soon I can expect to be in handcuffs, taken away based in part by your petitions. I am probably sure it will go unnoticed by the law just as the rest of society ignores it… but it is interesting interesting to note that the summary of the amendments to be found at section 2(3) of Chap 8, First Session, Forty-fourth Parliament, 70-71 Elizabeth II – 1 Charles III, 2021-2022-2023 (aka Bill C-11):

…specify that the Act does not apply in respect of programs uploaded to an online undertaking that provides a social media service by a user of the service, unless the programs are prescribed by regulation…

Interesting that they use the phrase “social media service” which may or may not inclue WordPress. And what is a blog if not a soap opera which is indubitably a program. We await the regs.

Boak and Bailey wrote a lovely and well reasearched piece on the lost pubs of Bristol by way of a bit of a tour:

Next, let’s turn left onto Mary-le-Port Street. Except it’s not there any more, so we can’t, really, but we can cut through the park to look at the ruins of St Mary-le-Port Church hidden behind the brutalist Lloyds Bank and modernist Norwich Union building. Then follow the path that tracks the old street pattern towards the site of The Raven. C.F. Deming, author of Old Inns of Bristol, published in 1943, reckoned The Raven dated back to the 17th century and was “mentioned in 1643”.

The article immediately reminded me of the time, gosh, ten years ago when Craig and I went a wandering in Albany NY, looking for evidence of the 1600s town and found the King’s Arms tavern intersection where the American Revolution started locally and where, interestingly, my fair city of Kingston, Ontario was in a very real way born:

But that, oddly, is not my point in posting that picture. Do you see how the street distinctly turns to the left? That turn expresses something a hundred years older than the King’s Arms, the southern design of the palisades of the original settlement. You can see it in this map from 1770 but, more particularly, you can see it in the 1695 map Craig posted to describe the community in the 1600s Dutch era.

Three or four eras in one small corner of Albany: 2013 when the photo was taken, the late 1800s buildings, the revolutionary-era tavern intersectiton and the curve of the 1600 pallisades. Lesson: everybody take B+B’s advice, get outside and look around you! It’s remarkable to see what isn’t quite not there.

Not for any particular reason other than it is a very nice portrait of some very nice beer people having a nice bit bit of beer. The source. The setting.

Jordan by way of IG (the app which I personally hope Bill C-11 SHUTS DOWN) has declared a winner!

There have been lager brewers in Ontario. O’Keefe, Reinhardt, Carling, Labatt. I walk past Toronto’s first lager brewer, John Walz, several times a week in Mount Pleasant Cemetary. I spent so much time looking at fire insurance maps that I researched corrugated iton. I spent so much time reading documents that I needed a nap. I wrote histories. With the help of @wornoldhat, we reviewed all the beer in the province twice. I’ve seen the vast majority of the beer that exists in the modern era of brewing. I checked with people I respect about it, including @beaumontdrinks. I legitimately think that Godspeed’s Pitch Lined Sklepnik is the best lager style beer that had ever existed in Ontario. First to Last. It is SIX DOLLARS A PINT on Sundays.

I love the non-pitched home delivered Sklepnik so have no reason to disagree. And I would not limit that to Ontario. And… I bought a mixed case with some in it because I see that it’s in cans and available for delivery right now. Big sale on Tmavý Ležák 12º. Just saying…

Nineteen years ago, I included Black Sheep Ale in a list of well loved English pale ales that I could find in my eastern Ontario nothern NY ecosystem. Well, this week the brewery went into administration, a step short of bankruptcy:

The Black Sheep Brewery has announced that it intends to appoint administrators to protect the interests of its creditors after the business was hit by a “perfect storm” caused by the pandemic and rising costs. A spokesman for Black Sheep, which is based in Masham, North Yorkshire, stressed that the business is trading as normal and there have been no job losses to date. It employs around 50 staff.

Fingers crossed. Malt still being delivered. And remember you can see Black Sheep as it was in 1997 in this broadcast of the Two Fat Ladies, those foundational thinkers in relation to my life with food and drink.

Beth Demmons has another great edition of Prohibitchin’ out, this time on NA winery Null Wines‘ co-founders Catherine Diao and Dorothy Munholland in which a very good argument is made, one that might move a skeptic like me:

The vast majority of people buying non-alcoholic beverages also drink alcohol, suggesting that NA alternatives are simply an extension of choice rather than trying to act as strict replacements to their boozy counterparts. Dorothy and Catherine say giving consumers more high-quality options was the driving force of launching their business rather than chasing a trend. “One of our internal guideposts for ourselves is ‘Don’t add more crap to the world,’” says Catherine.

Skeptic? Well, when the shadowy Portman Group is jumping on the bandwagon you have to wonder. By the way, look right. What a weird photo to illustrate NA bevvying in the news article. In any other context in any other decade, that image is pure code for being stoned out of one’s cranium. Very mixed message, PG. Very mixed indeed. Can’t be having that. You best be having a word with the Evening Standard.

Question: consider this from Mr.B:

I am repeatedly amazed by the speed with which respected and accomplished chefs will attach their names to suspect beers, ciders, coolers, and seltzers, while at the same time touting the quality of ingredients in their dishes. #MoneyTalks

Aside from the bald accusation of the role of money (something as common enough in beer), if no one has convinced most restaurants high and low from having a serious beer list, well, is this not something that advocates for treating beer more seriously have to take some responsibility for? Let’s be honest – if folks actually wanted it by now folk would have it by now.

Somewhat relatedly… seven years out forecasting. When everything matters does anything matter #3928? As scheduled:

WHY IT MATTERS: The growing strength of Modelo’s cheladas and aguas frescas point to a likely second act for a beer brand that, if current trends continue, is set to unseat Bud Light as the U.S.’s top-selling beer (by dollars) by 2030.

Less cheerily, at the end of last week just after hitting the publish button over here at AGBB HQ, Ruvani de Silva posted a very detailed, well researched and extended piece on the experience of being subject to online trolling as part of the bro culture side of craft beer world (which I have to admit for me isn’t limited to males as I have been on the receiving end from women, too.) But I immediately took to it as it made me think of the causes of craft’s bro culture.

Societal bigotry, yes, but also vestiges of X-Treme? Maybe tribal claims to one community, expertise with a leadership class fed by great white male hagiographies of semi-phony founders?.

I should have added booze obvs. But what do I mean by expertise? Perhaps this sort of smug self-affirmed but highly dubious expertise as opposed to this sort of largely self-driven expertise that makes no claims to extrapolation or even… you know… social status or higher moral ground*! David Jesudason’s thoughts were this:

Thoughtful piece. It mentions some abuse I got. I reported it but the police did nowt. Luckily I’ve done lots of work on resilience and it isn’t a trigger tbh. But some of the other types of trolling I do find difficult including subtweeting criticism cos I hate being ignored…

What else is going on? Not unrelatedly, this past Monday Stan commented on Jeff’s comments on Bud Lite’s maker’s woes following learning they were utterly unprepared and botched the response to their hiring of a trans woman Dylan Mulvaney for an ad campaign. The comment of Jeff’s that Stan considered began with this: “…years ago, I argued that it’s bad business for companies to take political positions. That was correct then, but it’s not anymore.” Note: Jeff made that earlier statement in October 2016 just before the US election when he wrote about Yuengling endorsing Donald Trump. He said it was a bad move. With total respect, I don’t really agree partially as democracy needs robust debate but also because I’m also not sure the two situations are even comparables as that would depend on the badness of the business move being the measure. Still, put it this way if I am wrong: at this point are we sure who is worse, the makers of Yuengling or Bud Lite?

Stan then broadened the question on how it reflects on the whole brewing trade and, again with total respect, drew in something which I have never actually found to be all that true:

Small breweries that some call “craft” have benefited by what is unspoken; that they are the good guys. Recently, they’ve been asked to prove it. Many have. The rest? We’ll see what happens.

The good guys? Really? How good is craft? Certainly doubts are raise by initiatives like the early and short lived co-opting of outrage against the war in Ukraine, the perhaps slightly deeper response with some to the Black is Beautiful initiatives even if not all the money ended up in the pockets pledged – not to mention, as Stan mentioned two weeks ago, the dimming of interest in DEI. (And not to mention… the continuation of bigoted operations like Founders… dots connected.)** Yup, it seems like its all just news cycle compassion so much of the time with craft.* Which builds on the question. Who is worse: the makers of Yuengling, the makers of Bud Lite or the appropriators of craft?

There’s another thing, a more important thing. I don’t believe that the existence of human rights even depends on political power or even the majority of folks’ conviction – and certainly not the stance of commercial operations like a brewery. Human rights are fundamental – a foundational fundamental good, not something politically sourced even if their denial by bastards in power is. Human rights speak to the simple inherent dignity of being a human in all its forms of subjective experience. The dignity shines through any denial and is always worth the fight. I hate to break it to you – but sooner or later we all will have one or more human characteristics which will annoy or even generate hatred by somebody. Don’t believe me? Wait for age. No, we can’t cherry pick which human rights are the winners. It’s all or none. Bandwaggoning the news cycle like craft isn’t any sort of conviction in support of human rights any more than leaving it to any stripe of politicans is. These are really appropriations of goodness. So show me a brewery that welcomes all, that straight up supports human dignity with action and little fanfare and I am there.*** Are there are all that many? Dunno but I do spend my money where there is a chance that they just might be worth my support. I suggest you do the same. It can have an effect. And if these my previous few hundreds of perhaps wandering words don’t convince you, think of what Brian Alberts wrote with just a handful:

Don’t just stick to beer, stick to just beer.****

Why? It matters. This actually matters.

That’s enough from me. You want more? As per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon:

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

*Yes, a double footnote… but why always place craft beer on the rosy glowing end of the good-bad spectrum with, you know, Donald Trump at the other Satanic end. Isn’t this obviously self-serving, all this praise from within craft beer for craft beer? (Looka me! I’m part of a community!! ) And another thing… what the heck has craft beer ever actually done to stake its claim to a higher moral position? Do you think of your favorite shoe stores that way, your coffee shops, your cheddar and gin makers or neighbourhood bakers? Actually, I do know bakers who ensure their surplus gets to the homeless day after day so, yes, props to those bakers.
**Can you believe this shit: “When Dillard reported the incidents to management, she alleges that she received drastically reduced hours as retaliation or was ignored. The complaint also states she worked as a part-time manager for nearly a year without moving up, while white managers were promoted within months. The complaint also details alleged instances of sexual harassment from a fellow worker. When Dillard complained about the behavior, she says she was ignored. But once a white employee complained about the same behavior from the same worker, the offending worker was fired. Things were so bad that a white manager also resigned because of the ongoing racial discrimination against Dillard.” H/T to The Polk.
***Could you get a wheelchair in the taproom bathroom? Does the sort of language used on the brewing floor align with the branding?
****Cleverly succinct. Reminds me of a Billy Bragg quip from a concert maybe 35 years ago: “Remember: it’s not ‘how high are you?’ – it’s ‘hi how are you?'”
*****And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. The Fizz died in 2019. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

The Thursday Beery News Notes For A Few Big Numbers

OK, I turned 60 on Tuesday. I am in my seventh decade. Just like that. Snap. Me, I am not that shocked and appauled by the prospect of time’s sands slipping so easily though my shaking fingers – but I also face the reality that I… began blogging twenty years ago this week, too. On a generic platform that within weeks included beer writing and around a year later split off into a bespoke beer blog. What an absolute waste of a lifetime! Seriously, think of all the languages I could speak, the instruments I could play if I had not taken to publicly scribbling back on 25 April 2003. That being said, I didn’t exactly become a polygolt before I hit 40 and it’s been a lot of fun… and look at all the stuff down there I read just this week… so…

First up, Gary has been on fire (to be clear – not actually aflame) recently with a servies of posts about beer in Egypt pre-WW2 followed by posts about wartime brewing in Tripoli, Libya. Great-aunt Madge was a frontline nurse in the Eighth Army so I was raised on this timeline with Airfix soldiers clad in shorts and ammo belts:

The OEA brewery was located in central Tripoli, near the sea. On Facebook a contributor, familiar with modern Tripoli, pinned the location on a map, near Dahra district. He adds other interesting information of a past and present nature, including that the brewery no longer stands. In any case, the Malta enterprise known today as Simonds Farsons Cisk was running OEA not long after it fell into British hands. It continued to do so until 1948, according to Thomas’ second discussion. In that year, he states, OEA was returned to its Italian owners, who are not named.

Less farthy-backy, Ron’s been writing about life in his 1970s, including this week about his early days of homebrewing which mirror mine in the 1980s:

After a while, we got hold of a five gallon cider barrel. Off-licences often used to sell draught cider back in those days, served from such a small plastic barrel. It made life much easier, doing away with all that bottling mess. Though you needed to drink the beer fairly quickly. A week to ten days was about the longest it would last. I can remember having a barrel of Mild my brother brought up to Leeds towards the end of my first year at university. The very hot summer of 1976. We sat drinking glasses of iced Mild on the balcony of my student flat in North Hill Court.

Note: craft‘s meaninglessness reaches new depths.

Cookie guided me to the story of one familiar face on Canadian TV in the 1970s and ’80s, our own perhaps second best snooker champ after Cliff Thorburn, ‘Big Bill’ Werbeniuk:

During his hay day, Werbeniuk would consume upwards of 40 pints of beer a day, with him often having six pints before every game and limited himself to just one pint per frame. Werbeniuk’s incredible super human ability to handle the beers was due to him suffering from hypoglycemia, a condition that means the body is able to burn off alcohol and sugar extremely quickly, allowing him to drink places dry daily. The Canadian’s drinking was actually encouraged by doctors, due to Werbeniuk suffering from a familial benign essential tumour.

I recall from the time, as reported in his 2003 obit, “that his prodigious drinking was the only way he could stop an arm tremor that hampered his play.” A perfect foil to the dapper Thorburn and likely a reason I took up the game for such a long time… pre-kids… you know.

Lisa Grimm’s Weirdo Guide to Dublin Pubs continues this week with consideration of the former pub known as JW Sweetmans, now reborn as the new pub known as JR Mahon’s:

With the return of cask last weekend – and with a pre-planned event there anyway – it was a perfect opportunity to check out the changes. The pub occupies the same enormous spot on the Liffey, with multiple floors and masses of dark wood, but it has been beautifully renovated and considerably brightened up – the stained glass on the ground floor gives some much-needed colour, and while the warmth of the wood remains, things certainly seem lighter and much more airy than in the previous incarnation. There are still many – possibly more – little snugs, nooks and crannies, but the flow is much better overall, with all four floors of space having a bit of their own character.

I had always thought grapes for wine were a sort of forever thing but it appears that they are only as old as the post-last-ice-age era and are formed to be what they are today in large part by hunter gatherer selection:

Grapevine has a long history as one of the world’s oldest crops. Wine, made from grapes, was among the earliest products to be traded globally, playing a key role in the exchange of cultures, ideas, and religions. At the end of the Ice Age, grapevine originated from the European wild vine. Today, only a few relic populations of this wild vine still exist, one of which can be found on the Ketsch peninsula along the Rhine river, between the cities of Karlsruhe and Mannheim.

Speaking of basic ingredients, Jordan was on a jaunt recently, one funded by a Ministry of Agriculture. When I lived in PEI, my local MP called himself the “Minster of Aggykulchur” so I am fond of these sorts of things. This particular MoA is in Czechia and was hosting a number of the glad to be invited to look at piles of malting barley:

For a hundred and fifty years, in a cellar in Benešov, a man with a rake has trodden up and back, up and back along carefully ordered rows of germinating barley nearly six inches deep. The slick slate floor mimics earth the kernels would find themselves in had the grasses been left to go to seed. The maltster pulls the rake with a practised motion long committed to muscle memory, stepping backwards while pulling with his upper back and triceps, rowing through the barley and leaving a patterned wake at three foot intervals.

To be fair, not a man. A series of men, we trust. Also to be fair, Jordan pre-discloses and then discloses in the best fashion and also shared at one moment via DM that across the taproom table “Joe Stange five or six pints in speaks of you as a free floating conscience” over my junkety requests thing which is a good thing to know. Especially when it’s a meaningful learning experience as opposed to being in the buffet lineup at another identi-fest. Releatedly, check out the CB&B podcast about top service standards in one Prague beer bar.

Conversely, there was recently a piece about a store that’s a real piece of Maine’s beer history which I was looking forward to being familiar with the area as a Nova Scotian but which I was quite quickly saddened by… being familiar with the area. See, Novare Res Bier Café in Portland was not at all the first craft beer bar in the state. I know because in 2008 I wrote about going there when it was new. Not even the first Belgian beer bar. That’s Ebenezer’s Pub. The Great Lost Bear is my candidate for oldest good beer bar, opening in 1979. We are also told that in the 1980s and 90s the breweries of Maine “were clustered around the urban center of Portland to the southeast” even though north aka downeast, at the shore just 48 miles from Bangor there were at least Bar Harbor Brewing, Maine Coast Brewing Co. and Atlantic Brewing in Baa HaaBaa. Most oddly, we are told “the Arline Road” connects Bangor to the bordertown of Calais. That’s the well-referenced Airline Route which I drove many times, called that because (before it was upgraded) you rode along on many hill crests with drop offs that felt like you might flip off into the clouds. I mention all this to point out how poor fact checking, a plague in beer writing, sadly places the value of an entire piece in doubt.

Note: complaining about this to the left but not this is, what, a bit calculated? Both are just harmless if utterly bland boosterism.

You know, I could post the same one observation about NHS Martin every week: excellent photography, understated insightful comment. Like this piece on a suprisingly lively pub in what I now understand to be the less than attractive town of Maidenhead:

It was a wonderful pub. Outside, children organised a fundraiser for Brain Research, inside the telly was ignored by professional drinkers and lovely staff called you “darling” and you could almost forget you were in Maidenhead at all… I don’t know exactly why, but the joy was infectious, and I’m going to resist mentioning Maidenhead’s red light area, grim underpasses and terrifying multi-storey on this occasion.

And I really enjoyed this BBC piece on small liquor shop drinking places in parts of Japan called kaku-uchi that may date back to the 1600s:

While kaku-uchi have evolved since then – for example, the choice of drinks has widened, with some serving cocktails and others specialising in beer or wine – they’ve stayed true to their proletarian origins. Everyone mixes on an even footing and, often, fluid seating or standing arrangements mean that all customers gather around the same table or counter – making it disarmingly easy to strike up a conversation. Simple snacks are available, with typical fare including canned and dried goods, pickles and oden, or Japanese hotpot.

So, and finally for this week, last week I made a comment about something Boak and Bailey wrote (my point: I would worry if beer was my only hobby) and found their response in… a funny place. As the scramble to find the next Twitter accellerates, the have (in addition to FB and IG as well as Mastedon and Patreon) Substack and its new notes. All very decentralized. So over there… and I am not sure the link would even works so bear with me… This was said:

In a quick, rather heartfelt blog post, we reflected on the positive role beer plays in our lives, and why it shouldn’t feel like a chore or obligation. Alan used the word ‘prop’ here, with concern, suggesting (if we read it right) that beer shouldn’t be anybody’s main hobby. We’d disagree with that because… it’s none of our business. Let beer be as important as it needs to be, as long as you’re happy and healthy.

I am of course fine with other people having other views… except for that idea that “it’s none of our business.” I mention this not to disagree or be disagreeable but to point out how much of beer writing is actually about making observations on the business of others. In the same newsletter, for example, B+B extended comment is made on how one navigates pub culture best by understanding that a “sense of community is created through exclusion” in many spaces. Frankly, I avoid boozehalls full of alkies one a very similar basis that I would avoid those full of racist memorobilia and junior goosesteppers. I judge both as forms of human degradation, distinct but, yes, sometimes overlapping.* I would also speak up frankly to a friend who was going off the path in either respect. Because I make it my business.

So, yes, my point was it is important to extend that sort of advice as a writer to anyone who might be reading, that it is good to check in with yourself about priorities and to remember that a singular fixation with booze is not generally a milestone on the path of well-being. Which is part of why I get such a kick from Mr. Newman‘s other interests. Or Jeff’s pilgramages. Or Ron’s Brazilian breakfast buffets. And if I am are going to speak publicly about the many jollies of the clink and the drink, I would be, what, insincere or even a bit false not to mention (let alone explore) the downsides, too, ** lest we end up as passion parrots. Balance please. Get that goldfish. As Stan wrote on Monday:

Each week there are stories that reinforce the myth that there is a halo ’round the craft beer moon.*** And there are stories that scream bullshit. There are more of the former, maybe because they are more fun to write. In my youth I worked at a newspaper where the publisher said, honest to goodness, that if we wrote something bad about a person we should find an occasion to write something good about them within the next year. Some sort of balanced ledger. It’s not my goal to find less pleasant stories to balance the feel good ones, but some weeks that is pretty easy.

All of which also leads to the further diversificatiton of conduits in our efforts to hunt out both the pleasant and the unpleasant truths. As Twitter slowly crumbles, there are more and more lifeboats to find all the interesting voices. It the thing to do is that we all add emailed newslatters and add Substack Notes and also Patreon and, additionally, consider (as I have) making Mastodon all yours. All again in addition to Facebook and Instagram. What else?

I’m still most pleased by Mastodon. I’ve built up 825 followers there over a few months which is nice as they are responsive but I really like the feature that I can follow a hashtage as easily as following a person. Here’s your newbie cheat sheet:

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things – including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and now definitely from Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason every Friday. 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 back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. Ben has revived his podcast, Beer and Badword. Still gearing up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too even if it’s a bit trade… and by “a bit” I think mean not really just a bit. There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week on Youtube. And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!****

*Now, to be clear, there are degrees of dependency from just being a beer dullard though to self-harm… and, yes, I the one who once faced the consequences of saying out loud to a EDI gathering that there were two sorts of racist. What I meant was there were (i) the ill-informed who could be eduated on the one hand and, (ii) on the other the intentional Nazi shithead… but facing a room of really pissed off Indigenous leadership led by one chief who said “OK, you are going to have to *#$&ing unpack that one, kid… and do so slowly and carefully” reminds me still that one needs to take care in exprerssing certain things.
**I am also reminded of the lesson in wilful blindness or at least abiding stupidity amongst beer trade friendly/dependent/sychophant beer writers when, years ago, sent out feelers years ago about why craft beer was not taking on anti-drunk driving as a cause and received this from a now little heard from voice: “As much as I am against careless driving caused by drinking, smoking, the application of eye make-up, over-tiredness, cell phone conversations or the accidental spilling of tomato sauce off the veal parmigiana sandwich being scarfered whilst at the wheel…” Classic.
***Stan provided this link to his “halo round the moon” reference.
****And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. The Fizz died in 2019. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

The Week When The Thursday Beery News Notes Finally Go Viral

Well, after 3 years and three weeks or so it was bound to happen. Got’s da ‘vid. Just in time for the four day Easter break followed by a week off. Drag. Good thing I planned to do nothing. So, this might be a very short edition of the old news notes. We’ll see how it goes. Before the beer, however, I know most of you show up for the gardening tips and, before I was struck, I set up a small cold frame with a loop of heating tape* under the soil to see if it could withstand -7C at night. Results were better than expected the next morning. Cheap and cheery set up.

First up? Some economic news which is not really news:

Increasing numbers of people are avoiding eating out and more than half have cut back on non-essential spending this year as the cost of living takes its toll, a survey shows. Fifty-five per cent of consumers have cut down on goods and services that they can live without and 63 per cent of those said they were doing this mainly by making fewer trips to restaurants, research by KPMG, the professional services firm, shows.

AKA: “no mon, no fun, your son” to which one replied or received the reply “so sad, too bad, your dad.” Economic downturns come and go. Right now, they’ve come especially hard in Britain but ripples ripple such that even last month’s darling Guinness is retracting. What I like about the obvious findings of the international consultancy group paid zillions to repackage the obvious is that it confirms the obvious. Folk with less cash buy less. Risk adversity is real. Does this also trigger gentle hagiographies like example A and example B? KHM has shared some thoughts on how this may also be affecting recent trends in brewing:

For the first time beers are being crafted to mimic other beverages and confectionery. Fruit juice , milkshakes, ice cream , chocolate bars , doughnuts , cakes , smoothies, pastries all inspire chunks of the beer world… For millennia beer has had a trump card that makes it safe to consume. Its alcohol content has meant beer is a food source that will potentially taste bad if contaminated but will not support pathogens that will leave people sick. The recent trend for alcohol free beer puts pay to that. Without particularly low PH and heavy dosing with preservatives alcohol free beer is a particularly risky proposition. We have already seen a global recall from Guinness of their alcohol free beer.

He was responding to Jeff who blamed demographics for the lack of interest. And while I see that in my kids who really aren’t kids anymore, I still lean a bit more southwestern than eastern Pacific in these matters… at least this week. There are a number of factors govening the decline in interest in craft beer including (1) the general long term decline in all booze sales, (2) the above mentioned general economic uncertainty, (3) the more and more obvious healthier lifestyle news about alcohol, (4) chasing fads and, frankly (5) boosterism fatigue, that other Jacksonian effect which taught beer writers to never say bad things about beer even when presented with poor skill sets or ideas. Without a lucid framework of ideas that seeks to understand the trade’s offerings honestly, consumers are left to their own devices and, being rational, should be expected to wander off towards more fulfilling and price conscious experiences. And they have and will continue to do so.

Speaking of things I really don’t know much about, I’m 32 years past law school and have even represented a number of police force – but, still, I had no idea:

In my 38 years in law and law enforcement most police Headquarters have an officers’ club which serves alcohol. The Law Society of Ontario too has a liquor licence lounge which serves alcohol to Judges and lawyers.

Going back in time, The Times shared a bit of historical research on the strength of beer in England in the 1500s:

The average life expectancy in Tudor England was about 35. The impact of drinking on their longevity is not known but in 1574 the household at Dublin Castle consumed 479.25 hogsheads of beer, or 207,684 pints, equivalent to six to ten pints per day for each ordinary member of staff. The current UK recommendation is for adults not to exceed 14 units of alcohol a week. If the residents of Dublin Castle consumed five pints a day, they may have hit 15 units every 24 hours. In other words, what is now considered a reasonable weekly limit was exceeded on most days.

Back from a winter in the south of France, Gary has shared some thoughts on the beer festival in he attended in Le Pradet, near Toulon, under a number of watchful eyes:

I only had two or three beers as we couldn’t stay late and miss the bus, which we did anyway – not stay late, but missed the bus! This occurred due to bus re-routing to permit the security arrangements, which included channelling people in and out by fenced lanes. French towns can be much denser in people and traffic than here, and evidently it was felt necessary to control the flow in this fashion. Just before opening two separate teams of government inspectors walked through to give a final approval. No entrance fee was charged, one just paid the price asked at the stands for beer and food. Security inside and at the doors was tight, but didn’t get in the way of a fun time.

And, channeling KHM, does one really write “tasting like tropical fruits I’ve never heard of” when tasting the syrup of tropical fruits one’s never heard of?

Thank you. There. Done. Enough. Finis. I’ll be the guy on the sofa. Now the weekly filler. Consider Mastodon. Here’s your newbie cheat sheet:

Anyone else? And check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and maybe from Stan at his spot on those Mondays but, you know, he writes bits and bobs when he can… like this! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason every Friday. 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 back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. Still gearing up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too even if it’s a bit trade. There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week on Youtube. And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!**

*The electic heating cord do-hickey used to keep pipes from freezing. Goes by many names. Popular item in rural Canada.
**And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. The Fizz died in 2019. Ben has had his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…) Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

The Rather Distracted And Perhaps Brief First Beery News Notes For Spring

So much happening out there. Except maybe in the beer world. All a bit dull this week. Yet, it is spring. And the plants are on the move. I have to dig up me parsnips as soon as I can. You never know if you are going to pull up something the size of a pencil or a baseball bat – but by leaving them in the soil all winter, their starches convert to sugars and the make a fine ginger orange soup. And wouldja look at that there? Growing right now in a corner of the basement in part of my seed starting set up. A zucchini. A tiny wee zucchini. It’s spring for sure now.

Speaking of farming, Stan is slacking off in New Zealand but took time to post a lovely image from the hop harvest:

“These are my moisture meter,” said Brent McGlashen, a fifth generation hop grower, well into a day last week punctuated with frequent grabbing, breaking and smelling of freshly picked hops being kilned on one of the Mac Hops farms.

There. I pretty much just poached his whole post. But there are other posts. Go see.

Picking up on the weak signals from beer culture idea, the monthly B+B email newsletter for March had this idea:

Futures thinking is a way of reflecting on what might or could happen. It’s not about trying to predict the future but, rather, accepting uncertainty and considering multiple possible outcomes… What’s the equivalent today? There are certainly breweries doing things that make most of us think, “Interesting, but it’ll never catch on.” For example, there’s been a slow but steady trickle of beers using waste products, such as Toast Ale, made with surplus bread, and Singapore’s NewBrew which is made with recycled sewer water.

Great. Sewer juice. That sorta puts the “dis” in dystopian, no? What next – powdered beer? Hmm. You know, I really do like how the focus is on coping with the range of futures rather than the prognosticating expert Dr. Tomorrow claptrap. It’s like the risk matrix sort of thinking I’ve participated in big project planning. Craft beer might have avoided a whack of issues if it has tried a bit of futures thinking… but… well, it’s craft, right?

No, let’s stay with reality based reality. Facts. Like this. In a bit of a post-St.Patrick’s Day round up, I found this to the right very interesting from KHM: “My mate Alan (of chip review fame) on the folk music cardio workout.” Seems a pal of a pal wore a FitBit while playing a gig on the big day and learned a lesson. I do recall fitting into my 32 waist jeans back in my slam dancing days so it’s a likely tale of health and publife aligning neatly. Can’t say the same about this item on alcohol and heart health that I came across, a medical study published just a year ago that, again, confirms that the J-Curve is a fantasy, given not only the now well established understanding that it’s not that non-drinkers get sick but, once sick, the ill just don’t drink as much. It now turns out the light drinkers are also otherwise healthier, too:

…individuals in the light and moderate consumption group had healthier lifestyle behaviors than abstainers, self-reporting better overall health and exhibiting lower rates of smoking, lower BMI, higher physical activity, and higher vegetable intake (eFigure 3 in the Supplement). Adjustment for the aforementioned lifestyle factors attenuated the cardioprotective associations with modest alcohol intake...

Veg intake. That’s what did Lemmy in. Low veg intake. I’m reading his biography right now, by the way. Quite the lad. The good news from the cancer study by the way is that the two drink a day thing makes a lot of sense. We are built to take a certain amount of the alcky. Bevvying below that is really low risk but, be clear, heading northward causes a rapid increase in complications. Not funny.

But you know what is funny? People debating if Jeff is or is not a “beer bro“! WTF? I haven’t a clue what they even meant by it. I assume either it’s being too Alström circa 2008… or not Alström enough! But he was slagged just because he triggered a discussion on whether it is actually important to have full measures of beer served. Of course it is, well all know that – and everyone else is wrong but… the point is this: who gives a flying fuck about beer enough to call someone else a “beer bro” like is signifies anything other than the speaker is a utter moron? Hil. Aires. Lou. Zars.

I like this image. A useful reminder that early US microbreweries were not about the dissassembling big macro but to leverage the interest in imports. That’s one of the “20% in 2020 era” revisionist myths that bulk craft created.

Hmm. I am of slightly two minds about this story in the BBC where a 41 year old warrant was enforced related to a bar room fight even if I lean heavily to the result:

The story began in March 1980 when McGrath, an Irish-British national born in Leeds, was out drinking with friends. The 21-year-old, by his own admission, became involved in a drunken fight between two groups of young men. In his telling, he fled to a nearby pub when police arrived. “I’m not getting involved with the police,” he remembers thinking. But British prosecutors alleged he was part of a group that assaulted an officer, who suffered a broken nose, cuts and bruising while attempting to restrain a suspect. Five men were charged, including McGrath. Instead of facing justice, he fled to Ireland. He says he absconded because he believed he was being “set up”.

Note: After the jury met, he “was acquitted, the judge told jurors that he did not know why the case had been brought after so many years.” Still… brawling and absconding are crimes. I’ve been defence on historic claims, though none so minor.

Martyn was on the Beer Ladies Podcast, well worth a listen.

Matthew wrote a good piece on Guinness in the Pellicle,* especially around the idea that there is Guinness guilt. I suffer from no such thing. I have always thought that a good mass produced beer is a very fine thing. Guinness is up there with Miller High Life and Utica Club and… well, there must be a few others. It can be lovely:

In some places, though, to me it just seems to taste spectacular: The Thomas Connoly in Sligo, Lucky Joe’s Saloon in Fort Collins, Stoke Newington’s Auld Shillelagh, and, my favourite spot for a G, The Fidds’ in Levenshulme, South Manchester. When I am in such a place, I wouldn’t want to drink anything else. It’s not just about the beer, it’s about achieving a certain, blissful state of mind. I don’t want to think, I just want some pints.

Why does Guinness make memories?My uncle told the story of following Scotland’s rugby team as a travelling fan and, back in the day in Dublin, having gravity poured Guinness from barrels under the bar… which meant the person pouring had to lay on their side. I myself had 14 pints one night for free in a pub in Hampstead Heath, London near our hostel back around 1986. I’ve told you this one before, haven’t I? One of the loveliest humans I ever saw walked in that pub early that evening. She just stood there, dressed in a little black dress, big waves of blond hair up top, wearing just that one broach a golden a harp. She stood there looking at us, us looking at her. Until the place quietened. Everyone just staring at her. At which time she proclaimed “BOYS, I’M THE GUINNESS REP AND IT’S FREE TONIGHT!!!” Suddenly, we were in a scene from a movie. We’d won the lotto! Cheers filled the place, kegs were carried in on the shoulders of beefy gents in branded garb, everyone loved everyone else and we drank and drank and drank. I can die happy having lived there that evening.**

Jamie Goode wrote in Wine Anorak about the pending crisis of worthless drinks writing now being done by computer rather than by ill served disrespected humans. But wasn’t this the promise of the computer age? Didn’t Dr Tomorrow himself promise us all in around 1974 that they’d take the tat work off the humans? The picture they paint of the life of a bulk writer isn’t that compelling:

…for a long time many ‘journalists’ have been employed creating copy with the sole motivation of search engine optimization (SEO). Reading articles that have been written with SEO in mind is tiresome. I don’t do it: I want my writing to be me, writing in my voice, in my style, as well as I can do it. I’m lucky that I can afford this luxury, and I’m hoping for my readers that they appreciate the integrity of this approach. Many modern journalists might be employed by a newspaper of repute, but they don’t get their bylines in the paper. Their job is to show up for a shift and get paid perhaps £130 to write an article an hour for 8 hours. The subjects are determined by keywords trending on google….

Yikes. Bring on the server farms, I say! Now finally… witness an honest brewery. And not about what is in the beer or how much they sold you but… but breweries being honest about taxes:

Ram McAllister, owner and head brewer at Fairweather Brewing, said the proposed tax hike will hit the small brewer with an additional 20.8 cents to 41.8 cents per 100 hectolitres produced or 0.21 cents to 0.42 cents per litre. “We don’t welcome any tax increase,” said McAllister. “(But) this one has been misrepresented or misunderstood as the equivalent of a six per cent increase in the price of beer.”

Thank you. There. Done. Enough. Finis. Consider Mastodon. Here’s your newbie cheat sheet:

*I’m calling it “the Pellicle” now. Not “The Pellicle” because that is not the name. Like “the rugby” which I say to my kid who plays. As in: “Good day at the rugby, kiddo? Good, now you know what I read in the Pellicle?” That sort of thing.
**And we didn’t even imagine doing something like this…
***And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. The Fizz died in 2019. Ben has had his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…) Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

These Be The “February Goes Like A Bat Outta Hell” As Per Usual Beery News Notes

March. The most magical word in the dictionary. OK, pie is up there, too. But March. It’s coming soon. I even started spring cleaning by working on the old cold room built under the front steps of our 1964 bungalow. That’s a tidier view of it in 2007. When I stashed beers. Some pretty sweet bottles in there back then. Now I am 18 months into mainly gluten free intermittent fasting in part to recover from that hobby. And, spoliers, I shelve more wine than beer. So this week, I threw a bunch of +15 year old empty beer bottles that I kept from those days into the recycling blue box including a couple of these – only then to be woken at 3 am by someone rummaging through who (as I found out when I checked in the morning) took them all. He’s going to get a surprise when he’s told at the depot that he has a fine collection of utterly unreturnable US-bought craft and import niceties.

Beer? Beer! First up, here are a few brief headlines for your consideration:

- - Yikes: “…if there is any fetishisation of babies at the event, it will be immediately shut down…”!?! Or… maybe sooner.
  - Hmm… brand buy out or merger?
  - Ron says parti-gyling but I say gyling paritay!!
  - Mudgie sees a pattern of busy pubs.
  - Bill Gates has bought 3.76% of Heineken.
  - The Beer Ladies learn about the origins of the Brewseum.

Speaking of headlines, this one at the BBC is a bit of a neck twister: “Brewdog: UK craft beer giant expands into China”:

The joint venture with Budweiser China will see the Scottish firm’s Punk IPA and other beers brewed in China… In a statement, Brewdog founder James Watt described the Budweiser partnership as “transformational” and said it would bring the craft brewery to “every corner of the world’s biggest beer market”. Under the deal, Brewdog said it expects its beers would begin to be produced at Budweiser China’s Putian craft brewery, in the south-eastern province of Fujian, by the end of next month.

Where is the “craft” in “multinational with ambitious plans under geonicidal dictatorship”? Also… funny that craft nerds are more upset about the arrangements with Bud! There is so little left in that adjective. And the also not-craft of Molson (Coors) is also apparently on the move too, though much less dictatorially:

Molson has seen six straight quarters of net sales revenue growth, with expanding sales in the Americas and elsewhere around the world, resulting in global net revenue above the 2019 baseline. Importantly, Molson’s third-quarter trend for sales to retailers (STR) was the best it has seen in over a decade. The brewer also initiated historic price increases of 10% in the U.S., far above the usual 1% to 2% hikes, to offset the impact of its own rising costs. So while Molson ended up narrowing its full-year outlook to the lower end of its guidance as a result, it is still expecting the long-term trend to keep growing.

Perhaps reflecting the core market that helped start this sort of growth during the pandemic, this week on Boak & Bailey via Patreon, I enjoyed their fond recollection of the deeper days of Covid when adults drank in the park:

During the second and third national UK lockdowns, in the winter and spring of 2020/21, we noticed that one of these wharves became a kind of unofficial outdoor pub. A group of men would hang out there most afternoons and evenings drinking beer they’d bought from the CO-OP next door. Some of them looked as if they might be homeless, others were in hi-vis workwear and branded boiler suits. You’d walk by and hear them chatting, amiably, or laughing together. It sounded exactly like a pub, only outdoors, with birdsong in the background.

And over on his substack page called Episodes of my Pub Life, David Jesudason shared the story of the Red Lion pub in West Bromwich and in particular the complexities* behind four stained glass windows:

In Smethwick and West Brom it was obvious where the diaspora came from and what their mission was. Punjab. Here for a better life. Dalwinder Singh who runs another excellent desi pub, The Island Inn in West Brom, summed it up: “I came here and I couldn’t speak English.” Now look at him. His punters love him. His son runs a thriving pub in Walsall. The glass shows how India was being partitioned and this led to huge amounts of violence between different religions. The bloodshed was not something they left behind in India, though.

Good to see such a range of winners at the Deja Bru 2023 historic recreation homebrewing competition, including an Albany Ale winning a medal.

Pellicle ran a helpful story on an oddly little covered topic – a beerfest. In this case, it’s the Independent Manchester Beer Convention aka Indyman aka IMBC and particularly worthwhile attention is taken to explore the venue, the 117 year old Victoria Baths, with some great supporting photos of the architecture:

Some breweries have the privilege of their own exclusive space and in 2022 Victoria Baths’ Turkish Rest Room became Thornbridge Brewery’s ‘House of Jaipur’, with light evocatively streaming through the striking ‘Angel of Purity’ stained glass window. By contrast, Berkshire-based Siren brought an industrial chic feel to the dark and atmospheric boiler and filtration room, while Cheltenham’s DEYA Brewing brought bean bags and chilled vibes to their bar, all drenched in deep red light. Things seemed to naturally slow down a notch in Room 3.

But in Thailand a beer fest has been cancelled due to the politics of beer fests:

The inaugural Beer People Festival was looking for a new 3,000sqm space after The Street Ratchada shopping mall announced last night that it would no longer host the event because its reputation could be damaged. “The shopping center is concerned that it may cause the public to develop the misconception that the shopping center supports political parties and is not neutral, which may bring about protests or political rallies and may cause disturbance to others in the shopping center or may affect the image of the shopping center in the future,” it… canceled the event to reduce “the risk of political impact” and reserved the right not to be responsible for any of the event’s expenses.

More have entered the AI-verkleption sweepstates this week with Robin and Jordan sharing their fears for future beer writing. And Jeff has continued his anxtity AI week. I wouldn’t worry if I were them… maybe. Let me explain. Last week Jeff posted a discussion with the image to the right that he descibed this way:

It’s appropriately Hopperesque; the algorithm successfully captures the distant look on the man’s face the artist was famous for.

To my eye, it’s actually a bit shit. Has all the charm of the diagram on a pizza box. The sepia tones are all wrong for Hopper who usually used brighter if matted colours. Plus the man’s eyes don’t have a distant look. His eyes are sorta crossed. And the woman’s hands are mangled like they got caught in a hay bailer and were fixed by a doctor who only used spoons. Then there are three glasses of beer for two people, the extra yellowish one dangling in space as it sits half off the table. Robin and Jordan’s AI text tests have a similar disengagement. Too bland to be claptrap. Elsewhere we learn that it’s an excellent source of neat and tidy packets of falsehood. So it’s also a claptrap machine. All in all, I think we are safe… and these three writers are safe. Unless you don’t give a crap about the standards of your imagery and your text or your research. What if you’re a brewery that buys and sells in bulk? Yes, this stuff could put fourth-rate branding summer interns at jeopardy. It could serve as a first draft short cut to let smaller teams get through more bulk work I suppose. But isn’t this fretting about the sort of stuff you want to avoid anyway? By the way, versions of this have been in places like law and community newspapers for years. No one seems MIA from AI. Is it all a fad, this year’s Segway? Shades of Free Beer 1.0 from 2005? Maybe.

Speaking of which. Where are we on the state of actual beer writing? Boak and Bailey in their monthly newsletter stated very positively that:

It feels as if there’s plenty of beer blogging going on at the moment. We’ve been struggling to keep our Saturday morning round-ups to the usual six or seven links. That’s fantastic to see.

Matty C, conversely, also posted some very interesting thoughts this week, interesting in particular given his chosen path. I aggregate thusly:

I’ve woken up thinking about the heyday of beer blogging, and how what I loved most about it was how observational and selfless it was, and how it helped me learn about the nuances of beer culture around the U.K. I’m struggling to find writing to really get engaged with at the moment because—and I’m guilty of this in my own work—so much writing now seems to centre the writer and their experience. And this just isn’t that interesting to me. I miss the observation.

I sit a bit in the middle of those two poles but find, as usual, it is important to move away from the idea that “blogging” is a class of beer writing, especially in terms of quality. There is some horrendously shitty paid and published beer writing and also some excellent stuff shared by amateurs and/or semi-pros either on personal websites, sent via newsletter or recited (with or with 27 “umms”) in a podcast. For me, what is important are the substantive categories – and what I see at the moment are a few main themes in pub and beer writing with, of course, both overlaps and outliers: (i) industry writing, (ii) trade friendly writing, (iii) politico-socio justicio writing and (iv) innovative creative writing.** Is there a fifth category worth mentioning?

Now… it’s the last on the list that Matt may be missing most, the interesting individual observation. There are a number of voices still taking the time to do this but they are certainly fewer than a decade ago… or two for that matter. Where are the wags, the short stories, the haikus, the artistes? As we can see below in the lists, we’ve had another wave of quietening of many voices in 2019-20. It wasn’t really the pandemic so much, I would argue, a bit of boredom after years of craft brewery buyouts. Which may be the real point. There is only so much to write about in beer culture, only so many angles – especially when during a deepening market contraction… errr, sorry, maturation. Plus when you find that your chosen area of life like beer culture is not always or never really was a “community” but in fact a marketplace undermined by an alarming lack of social justice, well, one starts to look for other hobbies. After all, it is only beer. And stamps are, you know… stamps! And there’s sherry too.

That’s enough for today. Did I mention that you still need to check out Mastodon. It’s so nice. I take pictures of all the mosses that I see when out on walks – and people tell me how lovely they are! Really nice. Sure, you need to take the time and have some patience but regular posting attracts the audience. I particularly love how you can follow a hashtag there. So do go and see. I even small-i-fied my recommended starter list of links for you so as to be less daunting. Have a look:

Remember also to check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters for more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and maybe soon from Stan at his spot on those Mondays but, you know, he writes when when he can. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more?

And, yes, also gather ye all the podcasts and newsletters while ye may. Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast but it might be on a month off (Ed.: which I have missed from this list for some unknown reason.) There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. Still gearing up, the recently revived All About Beer has introduced a podcast, too even if it’s a bit trade. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel this week on Youtube. And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

I’ve reoganized to note the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. The Fizz died in 2019. Ben has had his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…) Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

*Extremely complex it seems.
**Industrial writing, like say the UK’s Morning Advertiser, is really only meant for business folk and a few fawning fans eager to have new words in their mouths. About the newest gadget. Or hop price fluctuations. Presumably this is reasonably secure for the writers and important for business folk – even if dreadfully boring for everyone else. Trade friendly writing is driven by the writers who have fewer facts than industry writers but want to please a larger group of fawning fans. Clubby writing. Standard issue brewery owner bios, kitty kartoons and authorizative statements on national beer cultures based on chaperoned junkets, discount trips on long weekends backed by a handful of emails. It’s glossy and pretty and all a bit empty. It’s also too often uncritical puff. Even industry writing is somewhat critical. And social justice writing is clearly critical. At its best, it sits miles away from political parroting. It’s a rich area of exploration that now has been well examined and should continue to gather pace. But – whether it’s a history or one of the various calls to action – social justice writing needs and thankfully often receives a committed thoughtful hand on the keyboard keeping it both factual and compelling.