Category: Belgium

Your Fascinating Yet Exhausting Election Spree Beery New Notes For A Thursday

What a week! Voting seems to be the trend these days. There was Alberta’s referendum, then British Columbians gave the boot, Brazil didn’t, Serbia did, Ontario’s municipals were a bootfest and the tie of some sort in Israel in the books with the world waiting for the results of the US mid-terms before next Thursday.  Change or at least progress seems to be a theme so far. Progress is a handy phrase given its meaninglessness. Sorta like IPA. On the bigger picture, the other theme might be the failure of social media influencer expertise. Which, as a web scribbler, is very disconcerting. We have needs, too! But everyone else might sigh “finally… know your place!” [As my late mother would often say. Especially to me.] But getting back to the point, as shown above Bulgaria also had the first round of its national elections last Sunday, with at least one beer related incident:

The chairman of a section election commission in the village of Izgrev, Tsarevo municipality, was removed after an investigation following a report that he had shown up for work in an intoxicated state. The report was filed by phone. According to him, the man was under the influence of alcohol while transporting the commission members to the section. During the inspection, the Burgas Regional Election Commission found that the chairman was behaving relatively inadequately and showing disinterest in the election process. The inspectors also found that he had brought alcohol into the section’s premises – a two-liter beer in his luggage. During the conversation with him, a characteristically slurred speech was noticed. As a result, the chairman was dismissed, and a new chairman was appointed in his place.

Whew! No need of that. What else is going on? Well, care of Nigel we read that there has been an advance in the understanding of hops out of New Zealand:

Complementary sensory analysis was conducted using a sorting task with descriptors to evaluate similarities and differences in aroma perception. Hop samples from different farms exhibited distinct volatile profiles, demonstrating chemical differences among growing locations and highlighting the potential for origin authentication. Variable identification analysis identified compounds strongly correlated with specific farm origins, with patterns differing between cultivars, highlighting the significant influence of genetics. Sensory results showed that panellists perceived differences and described hops of the same cultivar differently depending on farm origin. 

I wonder if Stan has more on the implications? He does! Right there in his latest edition of Hop Queries:

One of the premises behind this recently published research article…is something I haven’t seen suggested before. The authors write, “Given rising prevalence of food fraud, particularly geographic origin fraud, the NZ hop industry may be a target for fraud” (because New Zealand cultivars are highly prized). 

Holy hop fraud fears!!! Makes sense. If something is definitively from there, it can’t be from here.. or over there. Speaking of Stan, is there a correllation between bad parents in pubs and objections to identifiying NA beer as… NA beer? Perhaps the wailings of the immature? Not sure.

Speaking of taking control of one’s environment*, Anthony Gladman has written about the usefulness of scoring guides in judging contexts. That’s his own version there to the right which he describes thusly:

Ladies and gentlemen, here it is, my gift to you to take away and use in your own life: the International Gladman Scale of Satisfaction — or IGSS for short. Unlike the tier lists of this world, which claim or imply objectivity, the IGSS doesn’t pretend to tell you how good something is. Instead it is based entirely on how the thing made you feel. Yet it’s precise about the difference between, say, merely nodding to yourself and feeling inspired to tell someone else about the experience you’ve just had. To me, that’s the most honest way to go about it.

I like it. I would recommend you adopt this sort of thing in combination with the AGBB certified personal tasting form as well as your own graphical representation of brewing history. For, as we all know and Epictetus taught:

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.

Some sad news.  The foundational Vermont Brew Pub is closing after 38 years as reported by WCAX:

 Vermont’s oldest craft brewery announced its closure on Monday. “Since 2020, we’ve struggled to get back to the level of business that is necessary to sustain our operation, and unfortunately we just don’t have the resources to hold out any longer for that day to come,” they said in a post on Instagram. It comes as downtown Burlington businesses battle with declining visitors. This summer, The Vermont Pub & Brewery told WCAX that foot traffic was down 20% from last year. The brewery first opened in 1988. They say their last full day of service will be Saturday, November 14.

That up there a picture of me in younger and certainly prettier days back in 1992 where I am sporting the brewery’s t-shirt a day or two after a stop at the place. I remember having a bottle of Brazilian black lager there a couple of years before that. It was always a very handy landmark on the map for trips between Ontario and the old homeland of Nova Scotia back when, you know, one cut the corner across New England. Sad to see it go even if that trip isn’t made so much these days.

Similarly speaking, Gary shared his keen-eyed recollections of his visit to the Coach and Horses, Greek Street, Soho in London in remembrance of pubman Norman Balon who passed on at 99 in June this year:

He was best known for his persona of the rude and braying landlord, although many have said it was not the real man, but a pose. I think years ago here I mentioned my Balon story, but if I did I’ll say it again. I first went in, probably in the late 1980s, when the saloon bar was set up for lunch (main floor, not upstairs where the Private Eye gang met). He would sit in the corner, at the saloon end, and I spoke to him. He was gracious enough, my story was I had read about him in journalism by the great beer writer Michael Jackson. He seemed aware of the publicity, and said something about Americans coming in who also read Jackson. I think I said too I really liked the Burton Ale at the bar, and he smiled at that, knowing its quality of course.

I have avoided all the Halloween hoopla so far but Pellicle, like Gary above, has published a piece by Millie Milliken which starts a remembrance of a landlord who has left us then opens into a consideration of wakes in pubs:

…their role in the act of remembrance goes further than the ghosts that are said to haunt them. The Coroners Act of 1846 decreed that dead bodies were to be taken to the nearest public house and stored until an inquest could be held or a funeral arranged. This seemingly bizarre practice came at a particularly devastating time in Ireland, which was seeing an increase in deaths from the Great Hunger. When mortuaries were overwhelmed, the cooling beer cellars of a pub were the next best thing.  “Irish wakes have gone through lots of changes,” explains Cliona Purcell, head of curation at Waterford Treasures, which counts the Irish Wake Museum as one of its kookier offerings. “One of them was the use of the pub.” While more traditional wake customs revolved around the home—customs which still exist, to some extent, in the countryside today—the pub’s role eventually extended beyond housing the bodies. They started hosting the wakes, too. 

Interesting! On the topic of mortality, here’s a new booze and health study** that’s going to make every beer trade friendly commentator become an instant expert in anatomical pathology and other medical specialities:

Even low beer/cider consumption was associated with elevated cancer mortality. Alcohol intake from spirits at low or combined moderate-to-high levels was linked to greater all-cause and cause-specific mortality. Lower all-cause and cause-specific mortality were noted with low wine intake; meanwhile, high wine intake was associated with increased cancer mortality. Moderate or low red wine intake was associated with lower all-cause, CVD, and other-cause mortality, but high red wine intake was linked to higher all-cause and cancer mortality. 

Beer? No thanks! Pass the Bordeaux, buddy! Now… here’s some notes!

Note #1: Hadn’t known I’ve occasionally “ligged” until now.
Note #2: flashback to brewery and maltster fires of yore.
Note #3: Jeff talks about the weather – and it ain’t right.
Note #4: When Teds Roamed The Earth.

BREAKING! Ray (he a B of B+B) had that Allsopp IPA all the cool kids were talking about last week:

…the real star of the afternoon was Allsopp’s IPA on cask at The Kings Head. It’s very like Bass – clearly a cousin or sibling. But, perhaps because of the excellent condition in which it was served, or that controversial ‘inspired by’ historic recipe, had more marmalade and more zing altogether. We hope to see it around again. (Although someone in the pub was grumbling that “it’s not really, technically, what I’d consider an IPA…”.)

Zing! We approve. Yet… IPAs. Again. Is there a more wasted term in beer? Elsewhere… is David OK? I think he’s OK. But he’s wondering if he’s OK:

I come to consciousness. I can barely breathe. The room is dark but loud. There’s no dog. No family. I begin to panic. I’m in a hotel in Belgium, I think. The space is filled with the clinking of crystalline Church bells which are rung every 15 minutes – I have a flashback to buying a drink whenever I heard them yesterday. I eat breakfast. I drink coffee. I pretend to be normal among the elderly guests at the hotel. No one speaks English around me which is helpful because they could be speaking about me. Or is that the hangxiety? I can walk to the brewery from here. It’s OK. I can style it out when I’m there – after all I’m here for three days and this is my only real obligation.

A bit further to the east, I think Barry is OK. Probably. At least he’s been busy. First he helped identify the trees in an unorganized orchard:

Ok, doing something nice and useful. Last year, an old chap near Waldürn asked me to help identify the pears in a collection that was planted about 20 years ago. They never mapped what they planted 🤦‍♂️ I’ve assembled info on all the varieties I know they had available to plant, so making a folder.

Then he realized that he may have forgotten his own implicit access to another patch of pears:

…I thought it was just for one year, a year they didn’t have time to harvest apples to make their own juice. So for years I’ve been walking by these trees, which includes a magnificent Perry pear tree at the back, wishing I could still take some of that fruit. For years, I have been bringing a case of cider to the owners during harvest time, as we harvest from trees right beside their house. Trees that don’t belong to them, but used to, so it felt right. Now I realise they probably thought I was bringing the cider as a thank you for these other trees…

How many times have I said it: clarify your orcharding rights!! Speaking of clarifications, history fans should take note that tomorrow Friday at lunchtime UK time there is a Zoom by actual expert Dr. Amy Burnett on her PhD thesis that’s bound to be well worth watching:

On Friday 30th October at 12:15pm UK time, I’m giving an overview of my PhD thesis (on women’s work in 17th century English alehouses) for the @drinkingstudies.bsky.social Women and Alcohol cluster! All welcome. 

Here’s the link to the event and here is the contact for the Drinking Studies group. And remember the aysmetrical North Atlantic clock changing reality of this week!  I encourage such things as I have recently done the same sort of thing no doubt at a lesser level. Here’s the PowerPoint presentation for my recent dog and pony show to five paying audience members on the topic “Brewing and Drinking: Kingston 1790-1867“. AKA “spruce Beer Yuk!” Let me know if you can make that link work. I can’t. Hang on… so, if you click here and click again on that page… it appears to download.*** I trust the link provided by Dr. Burnett will be simpler!

More health news! In The Telegraph we read that Heineken has developed a strategy to cope with the effect of the adoption weigh loss medicines like Ozempic and Wegov amongst the drinking public:

Heineken has urged pubs to serve more half-pints as the growing popularity of weight-loss jabs threatens beer sales. The Dutch brewing giant has warned landlords that traditional drinking sessions where people enjoy several pints could become rarer as millions turn to appetite-suppressing medication. It has advised pubs and bars to prioritise smaller drinks, low-alcohol beers and smaller portions to avoid losing customers. According to a presentation seen by Reuters, Heineken warned hospitality businesses that medicines such as Ozempic and Wegovy could reduce demand for beer and cider by making drinkers feel fuller and less inclined to order food and drink.

Other maco brewers are not necessarily following in step. I am not sure that selling less is a means to increase sales but, yes, one must do what one must do. Speaking of which, ATJ has been down the pub and, speaking of sales, seems to have encountered something between a pawn shop and a hoarder’s home:

I was at the Peyton Arms in the North Oxfordshire village of Stoke Lyne, where the barroom was a feng shui nightmare, a clutter of photos, books, signs, beer mats and whatever took the landlord’s fancy. He was called Mick the Hat, grey mutton chop whiskers framing a kindly face, and yes he wore a hat, and all this jumble seemed to fit. ‘All the bric a brac here is my own work,’ he told me, ‘I like it because it is like there is something you will see and something you will miss. It is like coming into your own front room and I like people to feel homely. It works and when we came here there was nothing, but it is now chockablock. I also like cobwebs and Boris the spider, so everything is here as it should be.’

Sounds… hard to dust. And finally, out in the wider world of clinky drinky scribbling, results have been released by the org that defies acronym, NagBwah. It was heartening to see a wider range of entrants including (i) actual academics submitting for the academics category and (ii) even the venerable The New York Times column Wirecutter winning a second in the best review competition – even though only one of the two authors of the column was named. Hmm. Results still indicate the limitations of a self-nomination process, a fact which recommends in itself at least one category of open nominations from readership. And one wonders how a third was offered for a pleasant enough article which consists of 41% direct quote sentences from the single source mentioned, a trade association comms officer who called in from another drinking culture. But all in all a good representation of where the hobby or habit or handicraft stands at the moment.

There you are. That’s good for now. On my end, a very multi-media tech trick sort of exercise this week. My first use of A.I. in fact. Can you spot it? As you think on that and until we meet again, please check out Boak and Bailey’s postings on each and every Saturday along with their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then it’s your turn. Read and recommend, please. Scour the world for news tips – then let me know. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. What else?

*[Ed.: Were you? Really??]
**Li, Z., Tan, B., Desjardins, C. et al. “Total and beverage-specific alcohol use at mid-life and all-cause and cause-specific mortality: a prospective cohort study.” Nutr J 25, 114 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12937-026-01361-3. Here is the cited academic report on the study’s results in which there was a mean term of 13.4 years and 22,381 studied deaths. 
***Any technical advice on sharing a PowerPoint file that you may have is most welcome.

Your Beery News Notes For The Turned Of The Leaves And The Turning On Of The Furnace

Well, it was +2C at dawn on Tuesday morning which encouraged a return to bed* and then a first firing up of the furnace. Even though it warmed up as the sun popped out, one needs to listen for clangs and sniff for smells on a day when the heating isn’t a necessity. All’s well but probably should get it serviced. Clangs and smells are not the height of mechanical engineering testing. Right after someone looks into that new loud rumble from the dryer. It’s enough to drive one to drink. Which I did.

It’s also the time of year for the return to the tavern instead of the patio, I suppose. Though I always find October unsettling, especially as the American obsession with Halloween is creeping into everything earlier and earlier. And I am not just talking the noxious pumpkin spice this and that. Ghosts. Everywhere a ghost. Including at breweries like the Lemps of St. Louis:

The most famous spirit is the Lavender Lady, believed to be Lillian Handlan, Billy Lemp’s glamorous first wife. Her love of lavender clothing earned her the nickname, and visitors still claim to smell lavender perfume in empty rooms. Then there is the darkest tale on the tour: the legend of a hidden Lemp child with a disability, kept out of sight in the attic and given a cruel nickname by storytellers. Historians have never found records proving he existed, but guests swear they see a small face peering from the attic windows. The brewery has its own ghost stories. Paranormal teams lead visitors into the dark basements of the old Bottle Works, where the cave system once chilled Lemp lager. Investigators tell of shadow figures, cold spots and the echo of tragedies that unfolded in those damp stone rooms.

Lordy. We Canadians are still resisting and partially immune from these things, spending October instead by caulking, patching and sealing in anticipation of the blizzards to come. Regularly checking in on the attic insulation also, you know, helps ensure children are not lost up there. Duh.

News? News about beer?? Fine. Well, Guinness is retreating further from the US market, closing the Guinness Baltimore Open Gate on November 1, 2026 – which is all a bit strange given the recent boom in the brand’s fortunes. Jacob in DC pointed out one thing that may have been indicative:

Here’s a take: the beers coming off Guinness’ 10 bbl system didn’t make it to DC, which is flabbergasting. Diageo is a giant company and they never put their cans or kegs into DC distro beyond Baltimore Blonde and a milk stout in 2019! It’s malpractice! There’s a giant market just south of you!

Jeff on the other coast has more info – including his own loss of a sponsor – that ties to the broader situation owner Diageo faces according to the 2026 annual report:

Overall, spirits were down 5% and beer was up 9%. These results have spurred Diageo, under its new CEO Dave Lewis, to make cuts—none of them delicate. This is apparently characteristic of “Drastic Dave,” a former Tesco CEO  who built a reputation for “cost-cutting.” (Corporations believe that euphemism softens the blow, but I wonder how it feels to workers to be called a mere, dispensable “cost”?) Diageo has eliminated nearly 2,000 jobs this year (6.4% of its total workforce). The company plans to cut more than $1 billion more, and the U.S. has been hit especially hard: 36% of the staff at Diageo’s North America headquarters were recently fired as a part of the effort.

I suppose I am doing my bit for Diago with my now established taste for a Guinness 0 beside a shot of Crown Royal but I appear to be one of a shrinking cohort. It’s too bad. It’s both very tasty and points a pointy finger in a meaningful direction.

On the theme of international booze trade restructuring, Evan Rail has investigated the expansion of the wine bar for VinePair and reported on a few themes:

… the global “restaurant as wine bar” trend has another quirk, often putting much more emphasis on natural, skin-contact, and low-intervention bottles. “It’s a particular kind of direction of wine bars, rather than ‘wine’ in general,” he says. Beyond the list, de Vries says that the global “wine bar” trend has a few particular characteristics that include high quality food in smaller portions that are designed around sharing, as well as a special approach at the front of house. “What we see in this trend in these types of bars, even though they’re restaurants as well, is a different type of service,” he says. “It signals a social experience. It’s just more casual and more open.” The design and atmosphere is often different, too, with a greater focus on conversation and conviviality. In short, the trend is not just about nomenclature. It’s an entire worldview.

I don’t think I have willingly gone into anything labled a wine bar. I’ve checked the price lists. And the stash is so helpful in these matters at an actual fraction of the price. That’s a key factor for development of wine in fact, bars as one of Evan’s sources noted: “…it’s probably more efficient to serve glasses — multiple glasses — than have people buy bottles. You’re going to get a better markup on your glasses of wine.” I am not unsympathetic but I am also fond of my sofa at such moments, too. Time for some notes!

Note #1: Pellicle interviewed Mirella Amato.
Note #2: An obituary for a soon-to-depart Brussels favourite.
Note #3: We called them the yips… or the itch.
Note #4: More Guinness cocktails!
Note #5: Gary on Irn-Bru.

Out and about, NPR had a very good article this week on how to go about eating in a Munich tavern, preferably well before noon:

…Weissbier — or wheat beer — helps wash down a breakfast of boiled veal sausages, sweet mustard and a giant pretzel. Four pale, cylindrical Weisswurst arrive in a big tureen. There’s two ways of eating them. One is zuzeln, which involves cutting the head off of the sausage and then just sucking the meat out. The other is the old-fashioned knife and fork. Both involve removing the sausage skin, which you are not supposed to eat… Master butcher Andreas Gassner…  makes about 1,200 sausages a day. Even more during Oktoberfest, when they deliver 18,000 Weisswurschtl — as Bavarians call the sausages — for breakfast in the beer tents on the first weekend alone… The trick, he says, is to try it without mustard first to get the unadulterated, full flavor profile of the sausage. He advises giving it a good sniff, too. 

As the old saying goes, furnaces and sausages. I am now better educated. But I am not sure I could perform a zuzeln with any grace were sitting at one of those tables facing down the Weisswurst. More seriously and viewing the other side of the bar where the work is done, David J. has written for CAMRA about the losses workers suffer when breweries and bars shut, starting with this portrait:

A few years ago, a neighbour was telling me about her new job in a local bar a bus ride away. Despite a tough childhood marked by the transient nature of care homes and foster parents, kindness was her default setting and I found her bluntness – which jarred with some of the other people in the street – easy to read. I rectified my mistake and took the 171 to Catford only to discover that I was not the only person to enjoy her company and she was firmly embedded in the community, woven into the tapestry of this pub’s framework. I’d never seen her laughing so much. A few months later, I was awoken late at night by loud music from her flat and had to knock at the door. When she answered she apologised, turned the music down and revealed she had been blowing off steam as the pub was now closed leaving her unemployed. Eventually, I saw her again at her new place of work but this job of delivering leaflets caused her no merriment and her downcast appearance was a stark contrast to when I saw her behind the bar that time.

It’s a very compelling thought on how extended the idea of “community” can be – and one that I’ve not considered given all the talk of how tough it can be working in the trade. On another element that draws the drinker, The Beer Nut raised an interesting question on nationalism and international beer styles:

Though a full 5% ABV it’s a bit thin, and the carbonation is lacking. The flavour is clean, however, with the coriander taking the lead. The fruity esters are minimal, which is good, though the orange peel element is relegated to the finish, and it would be better if that were more prominent. It’s a bit simple, overall, though I guess that’s the nature of the style: had it been brimming with complexity, it wouldn’t be a proper witbier. This is a proper witbier, and if you are looking for an Irish-brewed Hoegaarden substitute, it’s well suited. I don’t think it’s an improvement on the original, though.

I compare this to a post at LinkedIn from Mr. B in which he draws upon the current trade climate to make a related point:

… there are a whole lot of great local brands that I simply don’t see getting support from local bars and restaurants, especially those that claim to be community-minded independents. I understand that small production brands often cost a bit more than do the big brands, and that they’re not positioned to offer the same sort of incentives. I even get that there is an educational aspect to stocking local brands, since a lot of customers won’t be familiar with them. But I also know that when a customer at a bar discovers something new and exciting, they will frequently return to that bar or restaurant with friends and colleagues to show off their new find and/or see what else there is to discover…

My initial thought was this when I thought of the two observations:  was the Irish witbeer “new and exciting“? I am very much compelled by the current Buy Canadian efforts and, to be clear, both TBN and Mr. B have a vastly greater experience with a wide range of the clinky and the drinky. But I am not sure how often I have had a beer very often that was both “new and exciting“.** That Czechvar up there? Pretty tasty, for sure. I liked the glass, the momentary beam of autumn light, the rich pale malt… but was I excited? Interested, for sure. But to what degree? Then… would I have been more interested if it was brewed locally? I am not criticizing their language so much examining my own response. Frankly, its the veal saltibocco at Red House West that I’ve now ordered the last three times was the showstopper that will bring me back again. But that was a really good beer, too.

Imran Rahman-Jones has a handy reminder about the decisions that go into creating what attracts the particularly desired crowd:

A bar set in an old church should feel exciting and conjure some sort of cosy nostalgia. Unfortunately, any reminders of this building’ history have been covered up by a series of design choices made by – presumably – the same designer who has decorated every chain pub in the country. A number of generic neon signs adorn the walls in between a few large screens showing sport, while the booths around the outside feel impersonal. The decision to hang plastic pot plants upside down from the ceiling is interesting. However, I am keenly aware this is not built for me. In more self-reflective moments, I think myself fairly conservative when it comes to pubs. I say I want a “timeless” feel, but what I actually mean is that I want to pretend I’ve come to some point in the past when I enter a pub. I want to feel a sense of history. Cold Town House does not give me that, and that’s fine.

On the point of local, however, I am very compelled by the idea of small patch and urban vinyards. My 65 x 100 foot patch includes two Pinot Noir vines as well as a number of unproductive Voigniers. So this piece in Pellicle by Urvashi Roe is very much my thing:

Will Davenport, winemaker at Davenport Vineyard, has been with the project since the beginning. His role is to transform the grapes into wine at his winery in Kent.  ​​​​“​​​Forty Hall’s vines grow on a south-facing site in dry, sandy, and flinty soil over London clay,” Will says. “This means the grapes don’t typically dry out with that deep-rooted water source. ​​​Being in London means it’s generally a few degrees warmer than other vineyards in England, helping the grapes to ripen while retaining that acidity which gives the wine its freshness. They’ve also chosen Ortega and Bacchus, which are varieties that perform well​​​.”​​​​ 

And perhaps Katie has also shared something that I would find “new and exciting” after her visit to manage a bout of pre-flight jitters given its proximity to the bizarre:

The Sussex Arms is a pub completely devoted to the Concorde. For some reason. And I’ve come here for a pint to try a bit of immersion therapy. The tables are chrome and purple-ish glass. The décor is airport-themed, with a live updating LED board showing which aircraft are preparing to land right now in London’s four airports—incredibly addictive viewing. There’s fuselage on the wall and on the ceiling, and arrivals boards behind the bar. The “Business Class Lounge” sign looks remarkably real. Most spectacularly, though, is the central seating area, a conversation pit made from seats from the Concorde. Pet Shop Boys plays on the jukebox nobody has pumped money into since I got here. They look less plush than I expected them to.

Wonderful. Consider, too, what draws Ron to judging around the world:

After pottering around in my room for a while, and fiddling with my new phone, I flop downstairs for breakfast at 9:00. Without a great deal of enthusiasm. A standard buffet is so much better. Letting me pretend to be healthy while eating bacon by adding a dash of fruit. I get an egg and bacon sandwich again. And a milky coffee. Most of the judges are already downstairs judging. I sit by John Palmer and Noelle. We have a pleasant chat. Which is why I do these trips. The social aspects. Meeting people whose eyes don’t glaze over when I blab about 19th-century UK beer taxes. Or are at least polite enough to feign interest.

Finally but still speaking of the interesting versus the disconcerting, returning to David made a good observation on one of the perils of NA beer – especially the craft manufactured offerings:

As a side issue to AF, I have to avoid high sugar drinks as I’m prone to diabetes. Usually the macro ones have zero sugar but craft ones (in general) or top fermented ones can be high. Erdinger Alkoholfrei has 18 grams of sugar per 500ml bottle.

He was responding to B+B’s stated grounds for their use of the NA brews:

The first AF beer that we recall finding pleasant to drink – as in, we occasionally crave it – is Bristol Beer Factory’s Clear Head. It still has some of the typical flaws but, crucially, nothing that reads to us an off-flavour, and its hop aroma is actually pleasing. On the right occasion, it can be quite refreshing. We still find most AF beers unsatisfying or even unpleasant. We’re baffled, for example, by the lie that Schneider alcohol-free Weizen is any good when it is, in fact, like drinking Cup-a-Soup. In recent months, however, as perhaps our alcohol tolerance has taken yet another turn for the worse – we’re both now in our late forties – there have been occasions when AF beer has been a vital part of our tactical approach to a session.

[Cup-a-Soup! Lovely.] It’s all a very reasonably rational argument. But if I am not drinking alcohol – which is by far most of the time – I find other things to drink. I am perfectly happy with a pint of water between pints, too. Or along side even. I had one with that Czechvar. Tipping accordingly of course. Plus I had a Guinness 0 at the pre-tav dump of a bar the other week and was pretty shocked to see it cost four times retail.***

That’s a lot this week. Indicative of a man putting off chores because it’s no longer shorts and t-shirt weather out there. Maybe tomorrow. You bet. Until I make up my mind and for more fabulous observations of the Cup-a-Soup sort and so much more, please check out Boak and Bailey’s postings on each and every Saturday along with the coincidenal and fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. They do put in the effort. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then it’s your turn. Read and recommend, please. Scour the world for news tips – then let me know. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. What else?

*Look, I was in the work force for 47 years so I am not having any of that sort of response.
**I stared at the belly and butt of a flycatcher this week. There are many. Which was it? The little notch in the tail. That slight yellow to the chest’s edge by the wing. I am not sure a beer has taken my focus. Sure, the sauce of that veal saltimbocco does but, you know, that’s pretty much a given.
***You may have noticed a theme this week – I am cheap. Am I? Maybe. But I simply can’t see how my life is improved by significantly increasing my outlay by increasing heading out to an establishment everytime I want a sip. Which is honestly not all that often anymore. How do you all do it? And have you ever tried flycatcher spotting instead? 

The Month That Ends in Halloween Starts With These Beery News Notes

Now that I am six months (yikes!) into retirement, I am moving into a bit of a more organized approach to doing nothing. My plan is to really really achieve a state of active non-achievement and, so, on Tuesday I spent the morning an hour and a half to my east to meet up with an old pal who drove an hour and a half to his southwest. He retired on the same day I did by pure co-inky-dink. We had coffee in Prescott, Ontario and looked across the big river at downtown Ogdensburg, NY as we talked about not being employed and the related turning off many mental light switches. These two ships above did the decent thing and passed each other right in front of us just before we jumped back in our cars to make the way home for lunch. We also noticed the leftovers of crayfish strewn along the waterside path. Happy are the gulls. And at 11 am, the bells of the Ogdensburg City Hall clocktower rang clear across the water, taunting me with thoughts of the now forbidden delights of upstate NY such as white hots and top level NCAA hockey at the beautiful Appleton Arena a bit further inland. Once the current tariff war is settled, I will be back.

On a similar theme, first up in the beer news… more tariff time. This week, the US took the next retaliatory steps against Canadian booze:

President Donald Trump’s ban on Canadian booze kicked in on Tuesday, an unprecedented move that underscores the breakdown in one of the closest trading relationships in the world… President Donald Trump’s ban on Canadian booze kicked in on Tuesday, an unprecedented move that underscores the breakdown in one of the closest trading relationships in the world… For beer, though, the ban is virtually impossible to get around without an American bottling arm because it covers the bottles, cans and kegs that consumers typically buy. A Canadian business could technically ship beer to the US in a tanker, but that’s hardly practical.

Apparently 50% of Canadian spirits are exported and 93% of that goes to the US. But many brands like Crown Royal heading to the US market are already bottled in the States. And I think years ago I read that Unibroue in Quebec was supplying bulk beer (or maybe wort) for finishing and packaging in the USA so it might be something that can be worked out. Also, brewing brands under license occurs. But only to a point. So we shall see how this plays out.

And my very own* North Country Public Radio has made the update this week with the story of how tarrifs in the other direction have imposed on one cidery that focuses on the local as much as possible:

The problem is that most people drink Nine Pin’s ciders in cans — around 2.4 million cans each year. And while those cans are manufactured by Ball Co. in Saratoga, about 25 miles away, they’re made from imported aluminum sheets. Nine Pin co-founder Sonya del Peral said that a local business relying on a nearby harvest should be insulated from the trade war. But it isn’t. “It feels like that’s some global thing, and it is, but the aluminum sheets that Ball uses to make the cans come from Canada,” Nine Pin cofounder Sonya del Peral said. “Otherwise, we’re such a hyperlocal business.”

Elsewhere, over on Facebook Laura has shared some information about Sam Smith’s dealings with their pub assets:

Two weeks after publishing the story about the sale of the Wellington Inn at Knaresborough with a “non-pub use only” covenant on it, which we discussed here at length, the York Press has realised that the covenant is actually the real news here and got comment from CAMRA. I’m wondering whether Tom Gordon MP is being kept apprised of the situation and what his thoughts are on Sam Smiths taking a number of local pubs out of circulation without any proper recourse to the change of use procedures built into the planning system. It’s clear that a number of the SS pubs currently up for sale (21 it seems), though not all, have this restriction on them. It would prevent the local community for applying for Asset of Community Value status, for example… The Oldham Times is reporting on the same situation in their patch, relating to the Commercial Inn on Smallbrook Road in Shaw… Another “non-pub use only” sale.

A more vibrant scene was described in The Guardian which published a story by Scott Antcliffe on the search for the true kölsch in Cologne and provided a portrait of a number of fine establishments, including this on Brauhaus Sünner im Walfisch:

Down a cobbled alley in the old town, Sünner im Walfisch is pure historical theatre. Housed in a striking 17th-century step-gabled building, dismantled and rebuilt brick by brick on its current site, it serves as the old town outpost for Sünner, Cologne’s oldest operating kölsch brewery. Inside, narrow timber-framed rooms and low ceilings transport you back to medieval Rhineland. The beer is fantastic – crisp and dry with a peppery hop finish that makes it dangerously easy to drink – and it’s quieter and more intimate than the echoing halls near the station, its köbesse still delivering drinks with a wink of humour. A favourite for decor and character, if not quite for atmosphere.

Decor also was the question I hereby poach from Boak and Bailey’s Saturday update last week where the comments had some very interesting views of the origin of the long bar and queuing in UK pubs, including this:

When the Great Western Railway opened to Bristol in 1841, all express trains made a stop at Swindon so that passengers could stock up in the refreshment rooms (there were no on-board catering facilities in those days). Those refreshment rooms were fitted with exceptionally long counters so that the rush of passengers could be dealt with quickly and efficiently. Indeed, there was much comment in the press about the length of the counters.

Contrary-wise, as reported at ProBrewer.com, White Labs have announced a significant downsize:

White Labs, the well-known yeast supplier to the homebrewing and craft brewing industry has sold its San Diego facility and will be moving operations into a smaller location at the nearby Home Brew Mart. No changes will be made to its product availability or services, but the company will auction off its brewery, cellar and taproom equipment from its old location… The company will now run most of its yeast production and storage out of its Asheville, North Carolina location which it opened in 2017. The West Coast operations will be moved to a smaller facility and contain mostly administrative personnel and laboratory operations.

“This is infrastructure loss,” said Drew. Jason shared a link to the auction. Speaking of loss, in his latest edition of Hop Queries Stan has listed the effects of climate change on the European hop crop this year:

The Association of German Hop Growers estimates they will harvest 33,779 metric tons (about 75 million pounds), compared to 43,141 in 2025.  The Czech Hop Growers Union estimates production will be down about 25% from 5,207 metric tons in 2025. The official results from alpha screening by the Czech Chmelarsky Institut show historically low alpha values of 1.8% for Saaz. In Slovenia, in addition to the heat repeated hailstorms damaged about half 4,000 acres strung for harvest, with losses in yield between 10% and 100%. In Poland, frost damaged hops in some fields at the beginning of the season and the area suffered through the same high heat and low moisture conditions as the rest of Europe.

Happier thoughts next as I quite enjoyed last Friday’s cartoon in Pellicle by Dave Bailey (no relation) who took on the plight of the rejected Landlord logo lads and told the tale of how logo lads get on with their lot in life. And, showing me the way,  Retired Martin shared the moment he faces every year when the Good Beer Guide comes out and he gets his marching orders to investigate the new entries:

The new Good Beer Guide has dropped (ugh); it would have been poetic to blame my injury on the descent of this massive brick of a book (forgot to mention that last post), but it arrived while I was in Dewsbury and flattened Mrs RM instead. Having made every effort to limit the walk to and from the football (even took the metro to Piccadilly) the only sensible option was to get home and rest. But “sensible” isn’t a criticism often directed at me, and when the internet returned somewhere near Dore I started planning a “cheeky” (ugh) pint at a closest GBG new entry…

Viva cheeky pints!! Viva!!! Here are some notes:

Note #1: A massive personal wine collection.
Note #2: The first “news photo” from 1853.
Note #3: “Health beer”!?!?

About a month ago, I posted a short post on a tavern in my fair town and, on their next Patreon footnotes page, Boak and Bailey commented this way:

It’s always cook when a theme emerges in the post we’ve gathered together in the round up. This week, it’s obviously about what makes pubs feel relaxed, informal comunity spaces. Alan McLeod’s “tavs” are alien to us, although he does a great job evoking their atmosphere and vibe: “When I paid my bill on the way out, I got called “hon’” by someone less than half my age. “We good” she said with a thumbs up. The beer was a buck cheaper too. We good.”

Happy then was I as I came across an incredibly good set of short videos on Facebook called “Every Dive Bar in New Brunswick” where the documentarian (whose name I can’t spot) goes into tavs and describes what she sees. This one for me is a “tavern” or a “tav” more often as not. This one as well. Notice the really informal but bright busy vibe. Folks are “buddies” too.  Plus very little attention to the finishings of the place that needs to be respected for the punishment they can take. And this bar recorded (on another Facebook page) in Iowa also appears to be a “tav” to me. But this one is not a “tav” so much as a true “dive” to my mind. Looks a notch harder with darker interior and maybe more male oriented. Yet, there is much overlap… and the man who calls Keglers Bar in Moncton “our drinking home” nails it.

Observing another more rarified snack bracket, Eoghan shared the hallmarks of summer’s end he has spotted in Brussels inlcuding this ceremony:

I know summer is over when I see men in grey smocks amassing at the entrance to Brussels’ town hall on the Grand Place, on the first Friday in September. Usually I arrive too late to see the portly men in their traditional brewer’s outfits, some carrying wooden brewer’s mash paddles and others shouldering in quartets mock wooden barrels, arriving at the end of their ceremonial parade down the hill from Brussels’ cathedral cathedral. The parade, and the official church service that precedes it and features a priest dousing the beer barrel in holy water as an official blessing, is the starting shot for the Belgian Beer Weekend, a festival which occupies the whole of the Grand Place across the first weekend in September, and which is very committed to its pageantry.

Some holy moly archeological news care of Merryn from a few weeks ago in The Smithsonian.  A 13,000 year old burial site on Mount Carmel shows evidence of brewing by a pre-ag hunter-gatherer culture:

The evidence of brewing comes from “boulder mortars”: a stick can gouge out a hole in limestone, widening or exploiting existing water-formed low places. Inside these holes were found ‘phytoliths’: microscopic fragments of silica from inside plant cells & starch granules with evidence of malting. Together, these tell the story of a process: Someone gathered seeds by hand, stored them in fiber bags, placed them in a bedrock mortar & smashed them up, then transferred them to a hole where they soaked, germinated & malted. The mash was heated & left to ferment with windborne yeast.

So… lambic in terms of airborne yeast but using malted field grass seeds?  Very cool.

And finally, Boak and Bailey have given further consideration to the crap that A.I. is foisting upon us via PR crap sent out the beer scribbling set and how it conflicts with their thoughts about how good digital communications products and services are designed and delivered:

One key principle is that you start by putting a lot of effort into researching and identifying something people need, or at least want; and then you build it. But most of these AI-generated websites and apps seem to start from the other end: think of something you can easily make with AI to boost your limited coding and writing skills; then see if anyone is interested. AI makes this feasible because there’s so little effort involved in making something that you might as well take the ‘throw enough mud and some of it will stick’ approach. Except – except! – you’re then creating a bloody big tidal wave of mud for everyone else to wade through on your behalf.

They wisely advise “ignoring emails which have obviously been written with AI.” On a similar theme, apparently the US is going to remain A.I. as “Super Intelligence” which seems to be a throwback to the Information Super Highway era. Quite appropriate as cousin Wee Donnie wants to have us all living in the past. And seeing as everyone, like me, called “AL” are being  blamed for everything that AI does or doesn’t do, I completely support the idea of a new term. But I have a modest proposal for a better alternative. “Shitelligence” which, if you can’t immediately see the beauty of the idea is a combination of Intelligence with an honest acknowlegement that it is… shit. The same “S.I.” acronym can be used. Plus it is mellifluous. Trips off the tongue: “…shi-telly-gents…” You are welcome.

That is it for now. Until next week, please look tothis week’s doublist due Boak and Bailey’s postings on each and every Saturday along with the coincidenal and fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. They do put in the effort. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then it’s your turn. Read and recommend, please. Scour the world for news tips – then let me know. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. What else?

*Scroll down!

Already? The Last Beery News Notes Of August 2026?!?! Really???? Lordy…

A question: where do you pee after drinking beer? The sociological question came up in a conversation touching on the ethics in Ontario, Ireland, Germany and Portugal last weekend. And the associated question of “what and where are the woods?” was canvassed, too. That image to the right? It’s a Portuguese treed setting. Where peeing occurs. Seems a bit… open. Beer based peeing also occurs here in Germany. I think I can see a road in the background there… and maybe a shop. I have always wondered about where one may pee after drinking in the Netherlands in 1986 where guys just walked out of the door of the pub and peed on the front of the building. Seemed a bit too much overlap in the old Venn diagram. But I am Canadian. We do pee in the woods but what qualifies as the woods here is a bit more woodsy. Further field observations of the more tasteful sort will be received in the comments.

The other big topic in Canada is, of course, trade war v.3.1 which popped up again this week in fine style… which has led to more than a few becoming obsessed* with certain American products on the shelf. One branch of a grocery store chain in pretty small town eastern Ontario was spotted selling US wine:

A ban on the sale on all U.S. wine, beer, spirits and seltzers in Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) stores went into effect in March 2025 in response to American tariffs. LCBO is the sole wholesaler of alcohol for licensed restaurants, bars and grocery stores in Ontario. In a statement, Loblaw, the owner of Your Independent Grocer, says the bottles have been removed. “We recognize the importance of supporting Canadian businesses in this climate and understand why this incident raised concerns. The wine was put on the shelves without the approval of the store owner and once identified, it was removed immediately,” a spokesperson for Loblaw said in an email. It’s unclear how long the wine had been sold at the store. A viewer emailed CTV News saying they saw the wine in stock on Sunday.

The rules about these things are a bit unclear as the government run retailers and wholesalers have removed it from the shelves but it’s a bit unclear about what private licensees can do with earlier stock. It was older stock, right? I unkindly remembered the eastern Ontario phenomena of unilingual English labeled products from American sometimes seen on a quiet aisle of regional independent corner stores. Bootleg BBQ sauce is a favourite. Smuggled chocolate bars too. Yum.**

What else is going on? Well, Jordan finally lifted his head up for air and explained his silence for the last few months:

I was a Field Operations Supervisor for Statistics Canada for five and a half months and didn’t really have time for blogging. The nature of the gig economy means that you have to hang on to all the other jobs that will outlast a contract position, so there I was working what was ostensibly a nine to five position while teaching in the evenings and leading walking tours when they were booked conveniently. For the first couple months I continued to edit and co-write Ron’s new book, Brewed In The Family.

Busy busy busy. He also shared recollections of Texas Brown ales past, including Bellwood’s Grizzly Brown. I had a few of those with Jordan at the taproom with Ron P. back in 2014, detailed evidence of which evening can be found here. He did not mention at all where he may or may not have peed.

Elsewhere, it was Sausage Saturday when Martin and herself were in Newport the other day where the service was tiptop – as was his advice on etiquette:

Mrs RM called it before I did. “That’s off“. It was. If starting a conversation with strangers is difficult, taking your pint back undemonstratively without drawing attention to yourself as a CAMRA can be even more daunting. Quietly does it, use “end of barrel” instead of “off“, and offer the extra quid or so for the Thatchers. Which would have been the sensible choice to start with. Sausage and chips and peas for six quid fifty the only sensible choice, and frankly the onion gravy would cost you that in some pubs. Marvellous stuff. The landlord was briefed by the landlady and came over to apologise for the Butcombe, and the clip turned round. They’re advertising Thornbridge on the pump today; I’d give it a go.

Speaking of top pub food, Katie went once again to the Highland Laddie in Leeds and found her corner of heaven:

Ordering food at your leisure from a bar menu that reads like top restaurant business is exactly what I want. My tartare came with its egg yolk jam and tendon crisps and just as I hoped, I was transported to Flanders. The fire baked ham and house brioche dinner rolls was a beautiful pub dinner. I dipped my chippies in the egg yolk jam on my plate and found myself in the depths of comfort I get on my birthday when I take myself off on my own to a cafe for eggy chips and a pot of tea. The vindaloo devilled eggs reminded me of our family preference for using curry powder in our egg mayo butties. Again — deep comfort, delicious luxury.

And travelling a couple of steps further north, I like this review by Chitra Ramaswamy of a Scottish pub, The Keelson, and the wonderful chicken to be found there:

It’s official. Rotisserie chicken, a hipster craze that swept across London, has voyaged north of the border and landed in Leith… Through the buzzy boozer we go, with its many manly textures of wood, framed drawings of nautical knots, television screens (don’t approve) and SFA memorabilia (didn’t expect) to the back, where the small kitchen and restaurant section are housed. Nice, but we prefer the sunny, more pubby front. Can we move? Of course, says our friendly server. She doesn’t bat an eyelid when we ask to move again to a bigger table, to fit all the food we’ve ordered… my god, the succulence of the meat. Leg, wing, thigh, and breast have been expertly carved, the meat juicy and the skin crisp from incessant basting, smoky, perfumed with garlic, woody herbs, and vast amounts of butter. 

A fabulous retort in relation to the “non-place” observation from last week. So, too, were ATJ’s comments on how pubs can be an antidote to rootlessness:

That got me thinking about belonging. I lived in Cambridge for six years but that was not long enough for me to feel as if I belonged to the place. Then I recalled meeting an old girlfriend in 2024 from my time in the city who had since emigrated to Australia. As we visited some of our of old Cambridge pub haunts, she mentioned a couple of times that she was a Fen girl, and I thought of how that despite her long sojourn in Australia she still felt an identity.

Probably due to the WCs. And there was news in The Guardian about the tough position CAMRA finds itself this year and fingers are pointed:

For centuries, the wooden real ale pump has been the hallmark of a good British boozer. But now problems are brewing for the proper pint, as the Campaign for Real Ale has seen its membership sink to an eight-year low and its accounts show it is firmly in the red, making an £800,000 loss last year… Outside the Devonshire pub in Soho, central London, there is an ever-present horde of drinkers downing pints of Guinness, a stout made by the multinational company Diageo. But the landlord and co-owner Oisín Rogers says: “Real ale is all I drink”… Camra is calling for the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate the big beer companies’ stranglehold on the market.

More now about me. I received an alert from Sayre Piotrkowski who wrotes about a post at his newsletter Beer & Soul responding to my own thoughts on the general shrinking interest in craft:

Broadly, he argues that craft beer has lost ground since our 2019 peak, fewer people care, and the industry shouldn’t comfort itself with optimistic narratives about a turnaround that may never come. While Alan is replying to a piece that calls for beer to be treated as a cultural beat rather than a business one, with exclusively market-driven reporting, he is not lying: craft beer production today is well below its 2019 peak. But the leap from that fact to “fewer people care” is much harder to defend. An industry’s production volume and a culture’s significance are not the same thing. In fact, I think the obsession with the former is one reason we have become so bad at talking about the latter.

I don’t agree with his disagreement with my comment but (i) that’s just me and (ii) taking on the question of meaning over measurement is an interesting approach. One problem I would note with his argument is he appears to seek to then measure meaning by first suggesting then counting up other categories beyond sales volume – other ways people experience and enjoy good beer, leading to this observation:

People love their local breweries for all sorts of reasons, but no one’s esteem changes with the number of barrels contributed to the national production total each year.

This would be nice if it were true – and perhaps it can become true – but the entire arc of US craft beer’s story has been embued by the trade with an obsession with first marking and then obfuscating the actual meaning of actual stats.  Good for Sayre for seeking to move away from this failed construct.

Speaking of messaging, Eoghan shared this response to new health warnings proposed for booze labeling in Belgium:

Belgian brewers have launched a campaign against more forceful health label warnings – from “Alcohol misuse damages your health” to “alcohol damages your health”… Alcohol misuse does damage your health, but alcohol also does. There is no “safe” amount, similarly to cigarettes (a better comparison than the one they use – soft drinks). I’d question the fixation of brewers on this point – will the new label really make a difference?

And Boak and Bailey have been out on the road – the railroad – according to their Patreon update:

The following day we had a few hours in Brussels before catching a sleeper. We revisited L’Ultime Atome, which really doesn’t have much for beer geeks these days. The beer list is short and the food is pretty mediocre… We then got on a train for a long time. About 300 small naps later, via Amsterdam and Berlin, we arrived in Prague just in time for lunch. Our first beers were in an international brunch place, and we don’t even know which beers we had because they didn’t tell us which was which when they brought them to the table, but after 15 hours on a train they tasted damn good.

Good. No word on the facilities on the train. Here’s some notes:

Note #1: I thought Jake was being a bit rough until I realized he was talking about somthing else.
Note #2: “Brewers don’t have to have much skill anymore…”
Note #3: It’s the weirdly over the top statement that always kills my interests in what someone in the booze trade might be trying to say.
Note #4: “Not one knows” yet… available resources.
Note #5: is Stone now really really dead or just really dead?

A surprising bit of news in The Times this week about the date rape drug being used against men and in some unexpected contexts:

While spiking can lead to a further crime, such as rape, no additional offence is reported in 55 per cent of spiking cases, making it difficult to know what motivates perpetrators. Of incidents in which another crime did occur, men were more likely to experience theft or blackmail, while women were more likely to be sexually assaulted. Dr Amy Burrell, who researches crime and policing at the University of Birmingham, said: “I’ve seen all the combinations: females who have spiked males, males to females, females to females and males to males. Spiking is often a facilitator for other offences but it also happens in and of itself.” The majority of spiking takes place in environments associated with alcohol, like bars and nightclubs, however “mutual spiking” among friendship groups is also very common.

I found this report very disturbing and not something that would have occured to me as possible in the 1980s of my youth… then I remembered the chemistry major in my undergrad who spiked the orange juice dispenser at the residence cafeterian one weekend morning, apparently just to watch people get all sleepy over their French toast.

Finally, back to a more sensible topic, Andreas has shared some thoughts on the formation of esters and phenols in the brewing of hefeweizens, including this tidy summary on how esters are managed:

The main phenol is 4-vinyl guaiacol (4VG). It is formed mostly enzymatically from its precursor, ferulic acid, and to a small extent (10-15%), also thermally at temperatures greater than 80°C. This precursor is located in the malt (in barley malt more so than in wheat malt), and is brought into solution at an ideal temperature range between 40 and 45°C (104-114°F) and a pH range between 5.8 and 6.1. So to promote the formation of phenols, mash in low, do an extended rest between 40 and 45°C, and use at least 40% barley malt in your mash. If you want to minimise the formation of phenols, mash in high, and ideally use as little barley malt as possible. 100% wheat malt mashes are possible if you use rice hulls or straw as a lautering aid.

We are big fans of straw as a lautering aid in the eastern end of the Great Lakes… for over 200 years. And that is it for another week. We will have to see if there is a Boak and Bailey posting on Saturday along with the coincidenal and fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format – this week there was talk of crumpled beer tanks!  Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

*See these comments on Facebook: “So today YOUR independent put American booze back on their shelves. Unbelievable! They claim it was done without the Johnsons knowing. What a load of shit. Just another reason to not shop there” and “If I want American booze then I will buy it“! Lordy!!
**Apparently no one in the US administration checked to see how much of their buttwipe supply comes from Canada. A lot apparently.

Your Always Accurate Yet Often Questionable Beery News Notes For The Last Lazy Days Of August

Say what you like. Beer is pretty good but, be honest, toast is the best. See that there? My yellow tomatoes on cream cheese mixed with my green onions, chives and basil. Pennies worth of seeds, just months of waiting. And watering. And weedeing. All for toast. I once even made cream cheese. Bought the equipment on line maybe 25 years ago. It was great. It was a couple of kilos worth, too. Never made it again. You think a beer hobby or home brewing is a hazard to your girlish figure? Cream cheese making laughs at home brewing.

What’s up? For Everyday Drinking, Sarah Sioli wrote about an interesting problem with clinky drinky third spaces:

There’s a paradox anyone who cares about wine, gastronomic culture, and cities will recognize. When I go out to eat and drink in Barcelona, I almost always have to choose between two things I love: the kind of bar that feels like home, and the kind of wine I actually want in my glass. In this city, those two things rarely live under the same roof. It’s happening in many cities where bars are still part of daily life… And here’s where the paradox lands… The wood has become stainless steel. The kitsch portraits are gone, replaced by minimalist reproductions and photo prints. The crowd has become the modernillos—Spanish for the “cool kids.” The waiter speaks English first These places are what the anthropologist Marc Augé called non-places… 

Exactly! Non-places. Sounds a lot like those IKEA-inspired taprooms. For an opposing view, Ron’s thoughts on Canada’s VIA rail service have conveyed valuable information.  His trip into Quebec City even more so:

Alexei has found a pub with a decent beer selection nearby: Café au Temps Perdu. We head there.  There’s a supermarket nearby. But we’ll leave that for on the way back. Au Temps Perdu is a lively neighbourhood bar. We sit on the terrace. As the sun sets behind suburban houses. Dead relaxing, is how I would describe it. The air is still and the light golden. I get a Noctem Catnip IPA, the kids have cider. And some food: beef dumplings, fried calamari and poutine. The poutine is really good: rich and deeply savoury. It really does seem to be better in Quebec. The gravy is almost like brown sauce, in a very good way It’s a lovely summer evening and customers drift in and out, the crowd becoming noticeably younger as time drifts on. I get an espresso martini for my second drink. What the hell, I’m on holiday.

What else? Well, a lot of newspaper columns end up as higher forms of listicle – which is readonable given the general readership – but this column by Pete Brown in the Times of London provided us with a very suscinct history of Italian Pilsners:

In 1996 an Italian brewer called Agostino Arioli set up a new brewery, Birrificio Italiano, just outside Milan. He was a huge fan of the hoppy German Jever Pilsener, and wanted to brew a copy. It didn’t work, so he tried the English practice of “dry-hopping”, where raw hop flowers or pellets are added to the beer after fermentation to intensify the fruity flavour. That didn’t work either. But he had accidentally created a beer that he loved — he named it Tipopils (Italian for “kind of pils”). Exhibiting it at a brewing competition in Munich, he met Matt Brynildson, an American brewer who liked Tipopils so much he went straight back to Firestone Walker in California and made his own version. 

Speaking of lagers, Boak and Bailey shared a bit of a study on the place of cask ale in an English heat wave – but included some thoughts of a nice colder lager:

We think it’s that lager has less going on or, rather, that its complexity is fairly subtle. In hot weather, what you want is water but better, and a good lager can be like that. It won’t make you chew on anything, or overwhelm your nasal apparatus before you’ve even taken a gulp. It has enough bitterness to provide an invigorating bite but not so much that it takes even the slightest effort. This is all perilously close to the language of beers that are ‘drinkable’ and ‘refreshing’ but in hot weather those qualities do become rather more appealing.

I’ve been told my own complexity is pretty subtle. (“Too damn subtle!” read the marginal notes on much of my marked school work.) Speaking of B+B, on their Patreon footnotes last weekend I commented on their thought that once a beer becomes too different it arguably ceases to be beer. My comment was that “scotch taping non-beery things onto the category of “beer” dilutes statistical certainty but it also conveys a lack of, what… authorship.” IE: if you make sometihng new, name it something new. The recent obituary of wine writer Matthew Jukes pointed out an example of this:

Known in the trade as “Jukesy”, he was adored by Australians because he did so much to champion their wines in his books, journalism and broadcasting… He also ventured successfully into business, responding to changing trends in alcohol consumption by creating a range of zero-alcohol drinks that could “replace wine for a wine-savvy palate”. His recipes were inspired by Haymaker’s Punch, a cordial made by farmers in the 17th century using leftover fruit and vegetables steeped in vinegar. Soon his “Jukes Cordialities”, having started in a kitchen under a Battersea railway arch, were winning orders from Michelin-starred restaurants around the world.

I mention this as it affirms a usefulness in taxonomy that the booze world largely ignores – giving each thing its own name. I might be more interested (errr… even slightly interested) in booze replacement fluids (BRFs) if they were called “cordialities” or, you know, anything other than the thing that they are not. For example and by way of illustration, consider this statement in a recent post at BMI:

Notably, non-alc beer accelerated from week to week, up 15.7% for wk thru Aug 2 vs +14.7% in prior wk thru Jul 26, making it one of the only alc bev segments to do so…

One day soon footware and car parts will also be included as “alc bev segments” to further plump the stats.

Almost relatedly, in Pellicle David J wrote about Stirchley Wines & Spirits of Birmingham, which in 1989 became one of those fabulous pre-“craft” beer retailers, a now largely unsung foundation of the beer beer movement:

…Krishan made sure not to overlook British breweries—although he confesses he generally found the era’s offerings quite samey—and stocked outliers like Worthington White Shield and Samuel Smith before supermarkets had extensive beer ranges. He dealt directly with breweries like Shrewsbury’s Salopian, in some cases before they were established, and was especially excited when new ones opened in Birmingham. The key to Stirchley Wines’ enduring success, though, was always offering a range of beers that appealed to all types of drinkers, whether they were interested in the modern, the traditional, or rare imports. Today, the locally brewed Batham’s Best Bitter is the shop’s single bestseller, but Birmingham’s Attic Brew Co. is the most popular brewery.

Update: I forgot to mention how much I enjoy the beer specialist shops, something that the pervasive nature of craft has perhaps stomped upon. Twenty years ago, I had to impose a rule upon myself that I would not could not physically touch any bottle for the first ten minutes of a visit to Finger Lake Beverages. One had to control oneself.

And did you hear about the mid-1900s Belgian brewer who may have been doing better than the taxman was told? The Guardian reports:

The hoard, which includes gold coins, nuggets and numbered bullion bars, was stashed in a bag in a bricked-in cellar wall beneath the grand villa originally built for the brewery’s owner, Theophilus Van Assche, in the late 19th century. Brewing on the site began in 1899 and ceased in 1970, and the listed property – the wrought-iron gates of which still bear the initials “VA” – is being completely renovated by the social welfare organisation CAW Oost-Vlaanderen to create new offices and housing.

Apparently, some of the ingots are marked in a way that indictes that it is no older than the 1960s so it is not like it’s Nazi gold. Less dramatic was another find:

A woman has claimed a free pint of beer after finding a coin and a mysterious message hidden in the wall of her house. The card, discovered by Ellie Mead in Bicester, Oxfordshire, revealed the cache was left there in 1971 by electrician David Judd, who promised “one pint best beer if penny returned”. A Facebook appeal traced his daughter, Helen Russell, who revealed he was now aged 92, living in Devon and happy to honour the offer. She said: “I do know that there are others all over the place but he won’t tell me exactly where.”

Speaking of odd things found at breweries, Will Hawkes on the twentieth annivesary of the end of Young’s brewery in the latest edition of London Beer City:

Well, how many breweries are also menageries? Young’s had not only 20-odd Dray Horses, but goats (cleverer than horses, SJY reasoned, they’d notice a fire in the stables before the drays), donkeys (a pair, called Bonnie and Clyde, found emaciated and nurtured back to life), a Dorset Horn Ram (‘a living mascot’), 17 geese, hens and peacocks. 

And here’s a thumbnail illustrating an all too common sort of interaction in the beer discourse from over at LinkedIn. I am playing with LinkedIn by posting pictures of my garden and my birdwatching instead of making up shit about my career path. Screw with the construct I say. Anyway, have a look. In response to a pretty light newbie 101 sort of infographic on Pilsners a certain Mr. M.D. Ferguson (apparently of the hops trade) takes the time to write “completely inaccurate on the hop part“… as if one looks to infographics for accuracy. Then someone called Dr. G. Spedding Phd (apparently of a booze lab) took the opportunity to redirect eyes… to an article HE got published in a trade mag a few months back about flavour wheels and not about distinctions among Pilsners. All of which conveys a disinforming disrespectful cocaphanic mess. None of which passed my mind’s eye without hearing the voices of Beavis and Butthead.

Speaking of butting heads, here’s an interesting angle on “Gulf War III, Trump Trips Trap” and the news that the US Navy has been struggling to provide supplies to the ships, especially the USS Lincoln – as reported in the NYT:

By tradition and Navy regulation, the commanding officer of a warship can request a “beer day” for their crews when they have been at sea for 45 straight days or longer. Given the Lincoln’s time at sea, the crew would have been eligible for five beer days already. A spokesman for the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which covers naval operations in region and would authorize beer days, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday about whether any of the ships participating in the Iran war had requested them.

Apparently Wee Donnie didn’t see fit to provide “toilets that work days” so I would expect that beer was not high on the priority list. In the 1980s, my home of Halifax NS had periodic visits from the NATO fleet and you could go on board. I remember on a very large US ship a few crew laughing about how the other navies allowed booze on board. I remember on a very small Canadian ship a few crew laughing about how, during the war games out at see a few days before they sank the very large US ship.

Booze and war have also had an effect in Russia with news laws coming in to deal with smuggling:

Under the new regulations, bringing just two bottles of premium vintage wine or high-end champagne without declaring them can trigger criminal penalties. Illegal transport of high-value wine in personal luggage has remained common practice, with Federal Customs Service data showing attempted illegal alcohol imports reaching 413.5 million rubles ($4.5 million) last year, up from 266.7 million rubles ($2.9 million) the year prior… Former government economist Oleg Vyugin noted that due to complex transport routes and rising tariffs, “European wines in restaurants cost like an airplane wing,” adding that “if you want to drink good wine, you have to spend everything you earned over the last two months, or be an oligarch.”

Pity the poor oligarchs. One last thing. How do you feel about subliminal A.I. text? Has anyone checked for that in beer writing? What am I talking about?!?!  Here is a portion of a discussion of Elliott v. New York Bariatric Group out of New York’s Judicial District of Ansonia/Milford:

The concealed text was a command addressed to machines, set under the caption and repeated at the end of the document… The plaintiff was telling whatever model touched the document to make its output agree with him and to treat the clerk’s prior ruling against him as an error that needed fixing in his favor. A second filing that same day, Docket Entry #178.00, carried an abbreviated version of the same hidden instruction. In the cybersecurity world this is called a prompt injection attack.

This was spotted care of Brendan M. Palfreyman, attorney in Syracuse NY who has a noted focus on brewing law IP but has been sharing how A.I. is being applied in (and is offensive) to the courts. It’s something like self-promoting search engine fodder. Could that tool defeat any integrity in beer rating sites, for example? Couldn’t be worse than LinkedIn.

As I figure out how to add subliminal messaging to this weekly update (buy Al toast!), please check out Boak and Bailey posting on Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format.  Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

Your Actual… No Really… It’s Already Mid-Summer Beery New Notes For A Thursday

Here was are. Even though full seven months will soon be behind us, the mid-year slide now begins. So you take the little day trips in the sun instead of those little afternoon naps that you might have had in June, back when there was plenty of time. Have you had enough ice cream yet? No, have more. Go get some! You could run those hiking shorts you’ve worn all summer through the wash first, though.  And read your Scriptures as you wait for the spin cycle to conclude – or at least Ecclesiastes 8:15:

Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun.

Good advice as we face the coming of August and the shortening of days. What else is going on? First up in booze news, that one time staple of waiting rooms thoughout North America, Time magazine, had an article at the end of last week about another “only zero is safe” health statement – this time by the Dutch Health Council – and the author Tim Brinkhof makes observation which I might have thought would have beeen aired before:

As populations age, healthcare systems become overburdened, and governments fail to sufficiently expand or change those systems, preventing preventable diseases is more vital than ever. But herein also lie some of the issues that de-normalizing alcohol consumption brings to light, including its overlap with other, equally pernicious public health crises. In many countries, alcohol consumption has already been decreasing for years, especially among young people. Yet, despite the dwindling popularity of both alcohol and cigarettes, various cancers, not to mention other serious conditions like diabetes and depression, have all been on the rise—again, especially in young people. 

So if we do live in an increasingly poisoned global eco-system where skills and social interaction become less and less valued, there may be plenty of other causes of harm which at least place the clinky and drinky in context. Not a comfort but at least perhaps an excuse. And the world might just need all the excuses it can get these days.

And, in another form of concession, Knut has noted a small relaxation of Norway’s liquor laws with a few odd requirements to move some transactions out of the

“The Government wants to make it possible for tourists and visitors to enjoy more complete and integrated travel experiences. We are therefore proposing that alcohol producers be allowed to sell their products directly to visitors,” according to John Christian Vestre, Minister of Health… A license to sell self-produced alcoholic beverages may only be granted if visitors are offered a paid visitor experience with an educational component, designed to increase knowledge about the production process, products, or local traditions. The scheme would also include limits on the amount that may be sold to each visitor during a single visit.

So, it would appear that you would have to pay to take the same educational experience each time that you go to the producer’s location to buy something to drink. Perhaps similarly odd is the tale of regulation out of Wisconsin as a politically active brewery, Minocqua Brewing Company, has received notice from the state’s Department of Revenue that its license is being revoked. Owner Kirk Bangstad is insensed:

Bangstad said the DOR is “trying to shut down the state’s most progressive brewery for violations that can only be described as laughable.” He said in the post that he received the letter two weeks ago, and the brewery has tried to rectify issues identified by a DOR agent over six months. Bangstad provided a chart explaining what violations were allegedly in the document from the DOR. Those include unauthorized running of a retail outlet, violation of shipping laws and untaxed beer possession in an unpermitted warehouse… Bangstad, who admits to owing taxes to the state, says the “punishment doesn’t fit the ‘crime.’” He says the revocation is tied to organizations against his political leanings, and claims his beer has been boycotted by distributors and stores because of his political statements.

Careful readers keeping notes will recall the news last March that the brewery announced that beers would be free on the day that President Trump dies. Could have been that. Or calling the guy Shitler.

Back on track, Pellicle’s feature this week is by ATJ who finds himself in Italy, face to face with thirty years of Tipopils:

When he opened the brewpub, it was only the third in Italy. In the same year, Teo Musso opened Baladin in the nearby region of Piedmont, to the west of Milan. Things weren’t easy, as there were no suppliers of raw materials for smaller breweries. Agostino’s father’s connections in the brewing industry got him certain supplies, including brewer’s yeast; up until then, he had been using baker’s yeast, which he admits “wasn’t that good.” He also initially faced resistance from locals, with some saying that Tipopils was served too warm. He recalls an elderly local threatening him with a stick, bellowing that Italy was a wine country, before adding “I don’t drink your beer!”

Bellowing!!! More subdued news out of Ireland as reported by Jessica Mason in Drinks Business which leads to some interesting consideration of the local standards used to measure the what is a global retraction of interest in beer:

According to the latest figures from the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland (DIGI), Ireland’s average alcohol consumption per adult fell by 2.1% last year to 9.30 litres of pure alcohol (LPA). This marks a drop of more than one third (35.6%) since consumption peaked in 2001.  The data has revealed that consumption habits are changing in Ireland and although beer was the most popular alcoholic drink of choice for Irish consumers last year, with a 42.1% market share, it actually experienced a 2.7% drop in total volume sales. Wine’s popularity has more than doubled since 2000 and … spirits saw a small lift in volume of 0.2%, giving it a 22.4% share of the market…

Notice the LPA measurement standard. Annual litres of pure alcohol consumed per capita. A handy and hard to fudge measurement.* In a market where brewers are reducing strength quite aggressively to fit into taxation schemes while reducing input expenses, it would appear to me to mean that where the average strength of a pint drops, the number of pints sold may stay steady even while annual LPA may drop. If NA beers are included that could have quite an effect of the figure.

And David J. used another term this week that I was not familiar with – white label beer – which I take to be the equivalent of what we would call a grocer or restaurant chain’s house brand:

After a taster I could tell it was a very familiar tipple, and the locals shared my raised eyebrow. I took the plunge though mainly out of embarrassment in a busy bar. I slowly realised this was a pint of Greene King IPA and at £5.50 was probably the most expensive one I’ve bought. It was the drink my father loved, and I had the same nostalgic East Anglian hit with every sip. It’s just as Directors Bitter-fan Alan Partridge would say “They’ve rebadged it; you fool!” Now you would think this pint (which was superbly conditioned) would lead me to write an article hoping to spark universal outrage especially as it is nearly £4 cheaper nearby. But I asked an experienced publican for his thoughts and he said, “it’s naff, so I don’t do it, but honestly drinkers love seeing it”.

There was a time over a decade ago when a certain consulting brewer in Ontario worked with a number of craft startups who, not surprisingly, collectively offered a range of pale ales with surprisingly similar and unsurprisingly uninspiring taste. Still, my only thought is that these sorts of things are only offensive if the price point is offensive.

Speaking of offensive and price point, apparently wars and tariffs as rolled out by the US adminisration has not done wonders for Boston Beer‘s bottom line:

Freight rates rose more than 35% year over year, adding pressure even as lower volumes helped offset some shipment costs. Aluminum, energy and tariff exposure also remain concerns. Boston Beer expects tariff costs of $20 million to $30 million for 2026, which could limit the upside from pricing and productivity.

I love finance talk. Always seeking the positive: “lower volumes helped offset some shipment costs.” Interesting, too, is that the article didn’t mention beer at all. Unless that is what is meant by “older growth engines are losing momentum“… maybe.

Tariffs are of course also an issue here in Canada which this story just up the eastern seaboard out of New Brunswick on the situation faced by Moosehead illustrates:

About 10 per cent of Moose­head beer is shipped to the U.S., but with a 50 per cent tar­iff it will be a “chal­lenge” to con­vince Amer­ic­ans to buy New Brun­swick beer, accord­ing to Andrew Oland, pres­id­ent and CEO of Saint John-based Moose­head Brew­er­ies. “We ship a fair amount of beer to the U.S., and if these (tar­iffs) actu­ally go through, it’s going to reduce if not elim­in­ate the amount that we’re ship­ping to the U.S.,” Oland said in an inter­view. “At the same time, I’d say we all know that we’re in a very com­plex situ­ation with a very volat­ile trad­ing part­ner. It can change tomor­row.”

I haven’t sought out any Moosehead brews since they cancelled Ten-Penny but I do see that their lager is now on sale so… who knows. As we consider that, here’s some notes:

Note #1: “The viaduct is a dominating presence.”
Note #2: Gin with your afternoon tea isn’t at all about boozing. No way.
Note #3: Imran Rahman-Jones has a survey for you to fill out.
Note #4: “The French commitment to le pic-nic must be addressed.“

Via Jeff via Stan, we read a tale of contrition from the beer columnist with the Duluth News Tribune, Dave Hoops, including but not at all limited to these admissions:

I wrote about brewers as geniuses and drinkers as audiences. I wrote about taprooms as destinations, not workplaces. I wrote about “the market” as if it were weather, not rent, debt, distribution contracts, burnout, stainless steel leases, tap handles fought over inch by inch… The older I get, the more I think the local scene was never a scene. It was a set of favors, habits, arguments, second chances, borrowed jockey boxes, anniversary parties, charity kegs, bad batches forgiven and good batches remembered, people showing up because showing up was the point. I used to fly past that in search of the new thing, the national thing, the beer people elsewhere were already talking about. I should have stayed longer with the room I was in.

Relatedly, a very stretched stretch. Still, I do now have a sudden hankering for a Landlord. Similarly, I have a hankering for a Hoegaarden what with this from The Tand and this as well from Boak and Bailey:

We got out of the food and beer pairing game years ago, having failed to be convinced by the supposed miraculous effects of matching food and beer – especially if the food has any oomph. What we do tend to find, however, is that Witbier goes with almost anything. And by ‘goes with’ we mean that it remains tasty and enjoyable in its own right; rarely gets in the way of the food; and often enhances it. We’re always pleased to find Hitachino Nest White Ale on the menu at Japanese restaurants, for example. And, of course, there’s always Hoegaarden, our old pal, which contrary to what you might have heard is still an excellent beer.

Max went on another march from pub to pub in Czechia. I think of these things as being urban pub crawls but, as illustrated, he finds himself in some pretty remote spots:

I could have easily had a second or third serving, but right ahead of me was the hardest part of this hike, the fairly steep slope, the uphill one. It wasn’t very long, just 3 km, but I’m still not in the shape I wish I was. The climb surprisingly went well, I managed without even slowing down my pace. It must have helped that it was all in the woods, and beautiful, with no sign of civilisation to be heard or seen. The rest of the way to my destination, however, would be somewhat less fun. Not because it was ugly, far from it, but because it was almost all in the blazing sun…

Speaking of pub crawls, Martin reminds us that sometimes the march comes up short in other ways:

Dodington is really just a gorgeous long street that takes you out of town… and there’s nothing to actually DO…

And finally, Will Hawkes has adjusted his monthly newsletter London Beer City to provide a free monthly sampler story and an annual subscription to the entire publication for a mere £10. The first free offering is the story of a pub in the city’s Docklands between the wars:

It’s October 1933 and you’re on the corner of the West India Dock Road and King Street, in the heart of London’s Docklands. On your right is a pub with a sign reading, simply, “Charlie Brown’s”. And across the road, almost in the shadow of the London & Blackwall Railway’s low-slung brick viaduct, is another pub with another sign, which also reads “Charlie Brown’s.” How could this be? The answer lies in the story of Limehouse, a slice of dockside East London that, for more than 30 years at the start of the 20th century, was the capital’s most feverishly fetishized neighbourhood. Why? Because, since the 1880s, Limehouse had been London’s first Chinatown – and that brought with it extraordinary public interest, fuelled by prurience and racism.

That’s it. Next up, August. Back to School TV ads and a scramble to make something of the weeks of summer that remain. As you fret, please check out Boak and Bailey posting on Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format.  Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

*Well, it should be hard to fudge but in the methodology section of the report by by Anthony Foley, Associate Professor Emeritus at Dublin City University,  it appears that there are deemed strengths applied for each category of clinky-drinky: “The aggregate alcohol contents of the different beverages are based on 5% alcohol by volume for cider and 12.5% alcohol content for wine.” Happy to be corrected.

Your Clear and Crisp Mid-July 2026 Beery News Notes For A Smoky Smoggy Thursday

Wednesday morning news said that Toronto had the worst air quality on the planet. Around here at the other end of the big lake, Tuesday at 11:30 pm was a bit nuts, too. Getting out of the car after picking up the kid from work, it was like I was leaning right over the BBQ as I was smoking ribs. Good enough reason to stay in and watch whatever was on TV yesterday afternoon.  Oh, the Falklands Friendly was on. My linguistic imperialists against my hemisphere mates. Unlike others, I stuck to water and the other NA stuff myself.

You know, Eoghan has done an excellent bit of work with his series on the nations of the World Cup as can be spotted in his city of Brussels. He is coming soon to the conclusion and, on Tuesday, he turned to… Belgium itself! But where to look for the heart of Belgium in Brussels?

It was obvious. Here is a street, a narrow alley that rolls down a steep incline from Gare Centrale before skirting the Grand Place and emptying out behind Boulevard Anspach, charting centuries of Brussels history, architecture and patrimony. A street that might once have been the core of a Brussels nightlife district centred around the Îlot Sacré (the Holy Islet) – frequented by Jacques Brel, Jan Mulder, and the rest of the city’s post-war demi monde – but which has long since been converted into a holding pen, a quarantine zone, for the tourists that visit the city so that the rest of us can get on with our lives unencumbered by their nuisances.

And, keeping with the games, Boak and Bailey looked back to the World Cup of 1966 and found the promise of a financial boom from those games faded fast:

In 2026, it’s quite normal for pubs to have television screens and for people to gather there to watch big football matches together. Last night, even our local craft beer taproom was rearranged to accommodate an enormous screen. Back in 1966, though, the idea of TVs in pubs was fairly new, and pubs with TVs were relatively unusual. As a result, one story at the time was about how the tournament was causing pubs to lose business.

This is something that seems to have repeated now sixty years later in Toronto: “… demand for accommodations in the city is down as more rooms stood empty during the first two weeks of the World Cup than in the same time last year….” The Guardian reports things have gone a bit better for British pubs if card use stats are to be trusted:

Pubs have experienced the biggest boost, thanks in part to football fans taking advantage of extended opening hours, Barclays’ consumer spending report found. England’s group stage victory over Panama emerged as the busiest day of 2026 so far, with takings five times higher than the daily average for the year. On a year-on-year basis, England’s draw with Ghana resulted in the biggest uplift, as card users in pubs spent 244% more than they did on the same day in 2025, possibly because of a relative lack of action that gave fans time to go to the bar. The round of 16 victory over Mexico registered a 201.5% increase, measured over Sunday and Monday to reflect the game kicking off in the small hours.

US sales also have increased but by a much more modest 5.5%. But at least there seems to be actual interest… as opposed to the new beer out of Belarus:

“Minsk Capital,” whose design incorporates Belarusian state symbols, received contradictory reviews from buyers. Some consumers praise the drink, while others, on the contrary, criticize it for “excessive lightness and dilution.” “Light beer water from Trokhsosensky, but without the taste of socks and other drawbacks,” user Dmitry shared his opinion on the website of the “Krasnoye & Beloye” online store.

Speaking of authoritarian regimes, this week’s story in The Times on the health and safety record at BrewDog* surprises me in a couple of ways:

The company complied with the enforcement orders in 2023, but former employees allege that previous instances, where rules were broken, were not reported to the authorities. These allegations are denied. Watt’s lawyer stressed that under the former chief executive’s tenure, BrewDog’s safety records were better than the industry average. With respect to the enforcement notices, the lawyer said that BrewDog worked constructively with the HSE, invested several millions of pounds, implemented required improvements and that both notices were complied with and subsequently closed.

First, if as the story says, Watt was terminated in 2024 it strikes me as odd that his personal lawyer in 2026 is commenting on corporate activities prior to the termination. Does he have access to the records? Second… again… where is Mr. Dickie in all this? Why is his view never sought – let alone his role referenced. He was CEO at the time in question.

UPDATE: Watching CBC late night news at the end of Wednesday, this story out of Nova Scotia caught my eye:

Alcohol producers in Nova Scotia will soon have more options to get their bottles and cans into the hands of consumers after the provincial government said Wednesday it would be loosening restrictions on the industry. Under the changes, wineries, breweries, cideries and distilleries will be allowed to cross-sell as of early August, meaning they can stock their stores with products from another producer. The second change, expected this fall, will allow producers to open retail stores without having a production facility on site.

This is a great set of regulatory amendments that should put a lot of good drinks into the hands of a lot of curious people.  I really like the idea of local wines being sold in brewery taprooms for takeaway as well as vice versa.

Elsewhere, recent reputable talk of the pub in a Lidl grocery store in Northern Ireland inspired Cian Duffy of Every Pub in Dublin to explore the history of drinking in such shops due to the local licensing laws:

You can try cut the definition of a “supermarket pub” lots of ways, but I can assure you that Ireland has had basically all of them; with Dublin covering most bases. Even after deliberately excluding the extremely common (but not in Dublin) pubs-with-shops where the shop is now quite big, and weird cases like a co-op supermarket with an actual but rarely open bar (Inishkeel co-op Glenties); we have lots of examples. These include the direct equivalent of Lidl Dundonald – a supermarket chain opening a pub to run as an off-licence; but also a supermarket chain operating multiple pubs while awaiting redevelopment, a supermarket chain running supermarkets *in* pubs; and some edge cases including Lidl themselves holding planning and a licence in Dublin.

Interesting stuff! Here’s some notes:

Note #1: Laura has been keeping her eye on the Crooked House story.
Note #2: “Dangerously sessionable, as they say in all the best beer bars.”
Note #3: The best no-alcohol beers really should have a bit of alcohol.
Note #4: Clearly a definitive guide…

There were some interesting reactions to one brewery’s initiative on cask ale as discussed in the Morning Advertiser by Nick Payne of Brains:

…people want change. Now, if you sign a deal for four or five years, you’re not changing that keg range. What does cask give you? It enables you to change your beer and, potentially, you can have a different beer on every three days.

Nigel Stadler shared that when I left brewery sales in 2015 “a lot of cask customers were actually fed up with constant rotation of beers” and John Keeling added “Agree. I like staying on the same beer.” I would have thought that one of the great lessons of US craft beer’s years’ long contraction is that chasing the tail of change is not a winning route to building loyalty.

Aslo learning lessons, Alistair has done his “oft, when on my couch I lie” looking back at his recent trip home to the UK and has shared a few conclusions:

The main thought that has pottered and re-pottered around my noggin is just what a fantastic place the British pub is, whether that incarnation is in Inverness or Westminster. Of course every serious beer drinking country has it’s pubs, from Ireland to Czechia, and all stops in between, people love to drink in communal locations rather than just getting battered at home. Perhaps it’s that there isn’t an undercurrent of puritanical shame about going for a pint or two and just hanging out, there doesn’t need to be a purpose or an excuse to go for a drink. Anyway, back to British pubs – and of course this is all just subjective – but being, still, even at nearly 51, a rather introverted person, I find it interesting that going into a British pub is the easiest thing in the world for me. 

Over at his newsletter, Knut has been praising the updated ninth edition of the Good Beer Guide Belgium by Tim Skelton – and shared this bit of a tid, more nug than nugget:

Yvan de Baets, brewmaster at Brasserie de la Senne, outlines the changes in the Belgian beer scene over the years since the last edition of the book. “There are way too many beers,” he says. “Around 40% of the brewers in Belgium are fake, contract-brewers or bierfirma’s….. By taking no entrepreneurial risks themselves, the imposters are further flooding an over-saturated market, hurting the real honest brewer…”

Never the fake, Jeff has been reviewing the latest policy statements from the succinctly named Oregon Health Authority (OHA) on risks associated with alcohol intake and sought to leverage what I might suggest is a difference without a distinction, finding space between these two statements:

“…the more alcohol one consumes, the greater their risk of cancer…“

“…risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day…”

For him, the first from the OHA indicates “gone is any talk of moderation” while the second from the US Surgeon General indicates is “quite a bit different.” Me, with respect, I seem them as being pretty similar statements. The constituency that may inhabit any gap between the two would be those who drink less than a drink a day. Fortunately, that includes me according to my stats. Most people involved with beer at the key personal identifier level, however, aren’t like me. Jeff was clearly saying that the harms of booze are real, don’t get me wrong. But it is not the job of organizations like the OHA to balance health interests against the goals of other community sectors. Does one consider the possible slur by association against the poor pumpkin growers of the early 80s? No.

One last thing. Ron is treking through central Canada looking for the Laurentian Elite of beery experiences.

I’ve only been to Toronto before so I’m totally clueless about the other three cities. If you fancy meeting up and buying me some beer, get in touch. I’,m a sociable fellow and always enjoy meeting new people. Hopefully, it’s not going to be too warm in Canada. Andrew really doesn’t cope with heat well. When we were in Japan a few years back, several times I thought he was going to drop dead. 

I gave him some suggestions (did I?… Irene‘s in Ottawa after that CFL game, Ron!) but do add a comments or two under his post if you can think of anything else he could do. Err… I hope the smoke clears…

That’s it for now. When next we meet, the World Cup will be a memory just like the breathable air of yore. As you think on that, please check out Boak and Bailey posting on Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format.  Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter – but it may not be pay per view. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

*PS: who cares…

The Most Moon In June-y June June-ster Set Of Beer New Notes Of The Year So Far

It’s been a fabulous week hereabouts. Hard to suggest otherwise. A whole twelve days since the last close call with frost means I have about 45 tomato plants now out in bigger pots and into plots, one seen above. Last year’s dried garlic stems are one trick to keep the bugs away. You… are welcome. These are the sorts of things that occupy the newly retired mind. Mulch options. It’s a lot like that last summer before I had a job, the one after grade eight. Not quite mindfulness. More like mindlessness. But I suppose that’s the point after 46 years at the coal face. Or I suppose the keyboard. I am betting 50-50 that I will be driven nuts by this idle stuff come September. Maybe.

10 am EST: HOLD THE PRESSES!!!

There’s been a couple of updates arrived in the inbox after the deadline for this here Thursday beery news notes to be released to the unsuspecting.

First, Ron P. has posted a video that debunks a number of Scottish brewing myths. This is an excellent public service which I expect you will fully embrace… but… I have to note… he has chosen the oddest intro theme. Now, to be very clear Ron is a man who has not only excellent taste in music but has been to more concerts of every band I loved as a kid than anyone I have ever met. So… I am not sure why he chose a short tune that sounds like teenage whales practicing new ways of vocalizing while one fin has been clamped into a medium sized vice.

[UPDATE UPDATE: see the comments… Ron is the artist. I am reevaluating my appreciation…]

Then, more seriously, David J. has published a newsletter with his thoughts on the relationship between gambling addiction and drinking:

“Gambling was causing me pain and drink became the thing to numb the pain,” Harj tells me. Harj isn’t a one-off. There’s thousands like him who have been exploited by betting companies and have lost everything. Some have committed suicide because of their addictions, while many have hurt their loved ones by their actions; Harj tried to kill himself in August, 2020 by driving his car into a road’s central reserve. I say thousands of addicts but it’s probably much more than we realise because—guess what—betting companies won’t provide data that could lead to us being shocked into calling for radical reform. They won’t even release information on how much revenue they gain from the highest volume gamblers.

There are two things I am eternally grateful that I have not taken up: gambling and smoking. David’s subject Haji is now a spokesperson against gambling addictions and notes that there are few controls around betting machines in pubs where the connection between booze and betting is most direct. Have a read.

[Ed.: Update over. As you were…]

What is going on? First up and in anticipation of the World Cup that starts next week, Eoghan is visiting and establishment of some sort representing each team in the competition – all of which are located in his home of Brussels. The first stop on the tour was an ersatz US diner or milk bar which reminded him that “American cultural hegemony is ebbing” which is fair. But next up was a trip to the “Canadian” site, the qualifications for which is always interesting to a Canadian:

It’s important from the outset to say that La Luck is not a Canadian restaurant, nor does it have I think any pretensions to being Canadian. If it is known for anything, it’s as a board game bar, with the upper floor reserved for game players. There are no Canadian nods in the place’s décor – no maple leafs, no elongated hockey sticks, and certainly no well-loved photos of Wayne Gretzky or Alanis Morrissette. Instead, La Luck’s owners have gone for the vintage market bric-a-brac look, with it stuffed with old mirrors and picture frames and sundry recycled wall decorations. In the hour and half I was there, I failed to hear any Chad Kroeger or Avril Lavigne on the bar’s soundsystem. And the service, of which I will speak of more later, does not appear to reach the level of North American efficiency, or overt Canadian friendliness.

I like it. That is an entirely Canadian approach to Canadian-ness. Wouldn’t want to make a show of oneself. Not to mention they lost his order of poutine for over an hour. Does that speak to my nation? I dunno. Still, my own country is in fact hosting World Cup games and the Old Country has finally made it for the first time in decades… and, even with that, I think the argument made in The New York Times this week is all booze industry wishery:

…for beer manufacturers, the World Cup is a giant, multiweek, Olympics-meets-Super-Bowl sporting event that FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, projects will draw a global audience of six billion. There are early signs that beer orders will rise during the World Cup. In April, a forward-looking indicator of beer purchases expanded for the first time in 21 months, said Lester Jones, the chief economist for the National Beer Wholesalers Association, in an email. “Host cities for World Cup events will certainly experience an increase in both on- and off-premises beer sales as consumers enjoy the games,” he said. Beer industry analysts say Americans’ attention to the tournament will depend, in large part, on how far the U.S. team advances.

I am aware that forecasting and futurism sits somewhere between fantasy and fraud so we will have to see how this all plays out… but… BMI does have some stats that put the anticipation of a bump in context:

Beer industry volume down 6.1% for 4 weeks thru May 16 in NIQ data. That’s far worse than 3.3% drop yr-to-date. So this is yet another data point strongly suggesting industry got much softer in Q2, as consumers undoubtedly feeling the pinch from higher gas prices, among other factors.

Focusing on the smaller scale, Franz D. Hofer welcomed the new month with a post on the smaller beer gardens of Munich including one with bees:

A few beers later I headed west into the woods toward Aubing in search of a fabled beer garden surrounded by beehives. Passing a pond here and a few ducks there, I eventually found this little gem in the forest — Waldwirtschaft Bienenheim, the place where the bees live… About a hundred and fifty years ago, King Ludwig granted this plot of land once used for brickmaking to the Obst und Imker Verein (Fruit Growers’ and Beekeepers’ Association) of Aubing. And the Wirtshaus with its beer garden? It’s the former clubhouse of the beekeepers’ association. To this day the beekeepers of Aubing still hold their club meetings at the Wirtshaus.

And, somewhat similarly but with less charming results, Lisa shared thoughts on Token, a re-opened Dublin bar that left her searching to put a finger on a categorization that fitted the place. Previously at the old spot…

…it felt like a neighbourhood bar that offered something of an alternative to simply ‘sitting at the bar,’ though you could do that as well, if you preferred. This Token, however, feels very much more transactional, and much more, well, bro-y. And it may be that this vibe is a direct result of this new space: surrounded by bland offices and corporate apartments, it now feels like an after work ‘enforced fun’ spot for company meetings. The prices certainly fall into the ‘someone else is paying’ category with an ambitiously-priced pint of Scraggy Bay on offer for €8.20 (and a service charge added to food orders, despite it being relatively difficult to find someone to take your payment when you want to leave, even at the bar).

A “someone else is paying” bar is an excellent label. Hotel bars near industrial parks perhaps? Staying in Dublin, Cian Duffy has described another class of drinking hole, the neo-thatch:

Dublin has a reasonable number of thatched pubs, for a fairly urban environment. There aren’t any in the city centre, but there are plenty in suburbia. However, they are almost all pastiche in style. The thatch is real – very real, very expensive and requiring very skilled trades to install and maintain it; but the pubs were not thatched originally, and some are or were new buildings. As far as I can tell, the trend for this was started by the only thatched Dublin pub to have since been demolished (yet!), the S0440 Stillorgan Orchard, which was thatched in late 1988. A number of other pubs were thatched over the next few years, as this trend proliferated. S0232 Glenside was thatched during a renovation in the 90s, with N0300 Lord Mayors in Swords being thatched during its extension renovation in 1992…

How many times have any of us exclaimed “the thatch is real!”?  It’s not done around these parts, though I have an image that might show a thatched roof or two hereabout in 1833. As you consider that, here some notes:

Note #1: who “placed trust” in the self-reported data the BA uses?
Note #2: Knut on the cost breweries pay to attend beer fests.
Note #3: I’d be checking the corks for tampering before sipping Stalin’s wine.

As you know and as I know you know and as you know I know you know, “A Glass of Handmade” by William Least Heat Moon was published in The Atlantic in 1987. It’s a consideration of the state of microbrewing at the time and contains one of my favourite lines, a statement by Bill Owens of pioneer brewpub Buffalo Bill’s: “…I don’t make ale. I can’t waste time educating Americans about ale…” Owens brewed a light lager that cost him seven cents a glass to make and sold for $1.50. The brewpub is still there.  Jeff told the tale this week of similar project almost forty years later in Portland, Oregon:

“If we were going to do a light lager, we wanted to do it right.” Sam said. “Let’s not copy another beer, let’s just make the best light lager available”… The brewery can still make a profit on a $3 pint, but it then becomes a volume proposition. But because it’s so cheap, the volumes have really gone up—a virtuous cycle. And just having the beer on the menu has created a halo effect. The typical customer doesn’t come in solely for cheap Clubhauses. Instead, they vary their session with a Clubhaus and other beers, saving them money they then use to spend on more beer or food. That’s why people end up spending more.

Here’s to that beer lasting until about 2064. That would be excellent. Speaing of which last Friday ATJ experienced the excellent if not even the sublime* and shared the moment:

I have finished my beer but such is the mood of completeness, that serenity I mentioned earlier, the tranquility that bathes my soul, I decide on another pint of the same beer. Once again there is a dance to the music of time on my tongue as I take deep sips that are almost transformed into swigs from my glass. There is a sense of mindfulness as I sit on this wooden bench that acts as a living memory of someone called Dave, moments of calmness and reflection as I look out over the river and the landscape stretching away, aware of the high canopy of blue stretched with fluffy white above me. Everything is in order, the beer, the views, the slow susurration of voices behind me, and even though this outdoor space at the Bridge is bordered behind me by a road I don’t even notice the passing traffic.

Two tales of the Isle of Man this week. First up, check out Katie‘s excellent piece in Pellicle on the good beer scene there. Then, add the notes shared by Ed from his time at the biggest and apparently little loved brewery in the dependency, Okells, his former Manx employer:

I briefly worked at Okell’s a few years back. The job was one of the worst I’ve had, a cesspit of office politics. But the beers were the best on the island… I got first hand experience of the distain some Manxie beer geeks hold Okell’s in when I attended an event at the Hooded Ram brewery. It was a microbrewery run by a lovely guy called Rob Storey. He’d invited Okell’s staff over to the event so I  went with one of the lads from work. I had an inkling of the view some held about Okell’s, but I thought it better to be up front about where I was working so wore a branded work t-shirt. I was still a bit put out that someone booed when I arrived though! 

(Neither of them mentioned Kelly.) On the topic of an entirely different sort of search, I don’t know if I am wanting to find the cheapest beer in the world but, yes, it is likely that it might be found in an unrecognized state where Russian troops are both posted and somewhat cut off… perhaps much to their relief these days:

Official Foreign Office guidance advises British tourists against traveling to Transnistria but, in the interest of scientific research, Robbie decided to take the risk. It proved to be worthwhile. Exchanging his remaining Euros for some of the curious Transnistrian currency – which uses plastic coins more like something from a board game than from a bank – Robbie finally managed to find a beer that could compete with Yorkshire prices. He explained: “I’m delighted I managed to beat the 99p pint with this 77p one. It’s a surprising we had to go to such lengths to get a hold of it though.”

More than likely a notch or two higher up the old snack bracket, Ruvani de Silva shared the history and current scene for bitters for The Alchol Professor with a focus on the finer kind which may assist me with my Crown Royal studies:

Contemporary mixologists have an almost unlimited palette of bitters flavors at their disposal, from yuzu, bergamot, and cardamom to Japanese chili and saffron. By incorporating more international ingredients into their bitters, craft bitters brands are helping mixologists introduce more global flavors, which in turn can bring craft cocktails to a wider audience. “When an industry is shaped by a wider range of backgrounds, cultures, and experiences, it naturally leads to new flavor profiles, new use cases, and new ways of thinking about cocktails and hospitality….”

Bitters and soda on a stinking hot day? Anytime. Time may have run out elsewhere. In Will Hawkes‘ London Beer City this month, he shared the history of the Grove Tavern, a shuttered 1920s pub awaiting the demo ball which sits on the site of earlier establishments before the city moved in:

In the 18th century, the Green Man’s appeal derived from its rural qualities. Dulwich Wells sat beside the pub, noted for its mineral-rich water, the Matcha Latte of its day. The landlord in the 1740s, Francis Cox, also created Cox’s Walk, a tree-lined pathway that runs southwards and still exists today, to connect his pub with Sydenham Wells.  Rural delights remained the pub’s calling card for decades: as late as 1864 – by which time the Grove had been rebuilt by Courage – the pub was advertised on its rural qualities. “If you want to enjoy the country air, go to the Grove Tavern, Dulwich!” readers of the London Daily Chronicle were told. “If you want to ramble amidst rural scenery, go to the Grove Tavern, Dulwich! If you like swings, quoits, bowls or cricket, go to the Grove Tavern Dulwich!”

And from the police blotter this week we have a story of crime out of Hollister California – a crime weaponized with beer:

During the first incident, police said surveillance footage showed a man riding a bicycle who stopped and approached the robot, before knocking the robot to its side before leaving the area. A second incident involved another suspect approaching a robot near 4th and Line streets. The suspect appeared to strike the robot before approaching a second robot that recorded the interaction. Police said the suspect struck the second robot and poured a liquid, believed to be beer, before leaving the area… police chief Carlos Reynoso confirmed two people were arrested following unrelated incidents.

Is pouring a beer on a robot a crime? We will find out. And with that, we are done for another week. While you wait around, drumming your fingers at the dining room table as loved ones ask “what’s wrong?” dont forget to check out Boak and Bailey posting on Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.

*Finally, that 1983-84 honours undergrad English course in Romanticism pays off.

The Dreamy But Sadly Last Beery News Notes For May 2026

I have liked May so much this year that I am already missing it. Forty-eight weeks to May 2027.  I’ve already circled it in my calendar. Just in the last few days it finally feels like spring. I’ve got more twenty tomatoes outside into the spot where they’ll be sitting until November. Isn’t that twine tying action photo there to the right interesting? I really outstripped myself with that one. That is one snugly tucked in beefsteak, if you know what I mean. And there’s been more. I’ve mowed and then mowed again. Got a few semi-sunburns and even listened to a Blackcapped Warbler as it stayed just out of view. Not that it’s been Euro-hot but I will take 23C and sunny any time. Err… give me a sec. That knot. Wow. OK, let’s go.

First up, the residue in 4,500 year old clay pots from the Masovian Lowland in northeastern Poland have been analyzed and certain conclusions have been drawn:

These findings represent the earliest chemical traces of fermented alcohol beverages in this region, dating to the second half of the third millennium BCE,” the researchers wrote in the publication. The study also identified biomarkers linked to grain processing, including azelaic acid and plant sterols, suggesting the use of cereals such as wheat or barley, fruits and possibly resins used to preserve or flavour beverages. Researchers said the apparent use of wheat and barley is significant because the oldest known evidence of cereal cultivation in the region dates to the Late Bronze Age. “This suggests the possibility of importing raw materials for alcohol production from other regions where cereal cultivation was already well-developed…”

See also the 2,300 year old beer bottle from China. Do ancient jam jar findings get such rapt attention from archaeologists? Not a chance. And speaking of the sciences, The Beer Nut made a quality observation this week about one of the adjectives that gets tossed around rather freely – “tropical”:

I’ve voiced my concerns before about the t-word being rarely indicative of actual tropical fruit flavours. So it goes with this one, but that’s not a problem. In lieu of mangoes and pineapples, this 5.7% ABV hazy IPA has a bright pithy bitterness, pushing mandarin zest and lime rind. There’s an almost earthy tang on the finish, where the bittering compounds concentrate together on the palate. Despite the haze and the claim of tropicality, this tastes like an IPA from the classic era of Eight Degrees: big flavoured and technically proficient. I’ve missed that.

I don’t have an issue with degrees of abstration in the game adjectival. As a result “hoppy” is perfectly fine as a high level quantiative descriptor. But “tropical” has that next level general category aspect that TBN unpacks neatly up there through a winnowing to find out what is really going on. Mango? There ain’t no stinkin’ mango!

Speaking of getting to the specifics, Boak and Bailey examined a trade publication from 1960 called 200 Years of Brewing in the West Country, a 40-page booklet produced by West Country Breweries on the subject to West Country Breweries and found a firm in transition – whether they knew it or not:

From the first page, though, it’s clear that something unusual was going on. The obligatory foreword from the chairman is signed by… Colonel W.H. Whitbread. He was also chairman of Whitbread itself and his presence here signals that West Country Breweries was under the larger brewery’s protection as part of the so-called ‘Whitbread Umbrella’. The Whitbread Umbrella was “a novel structural arrangement that incorporated a dual-voting shareholding structure aligned to a controlling interest in the publicly listed Whitbread Investment Company (WIC), an investment trust that housed minority shareholdings in some twenty regional brewers” (Julie Bower, 2016.) Protection is an interesting word, isn’t it? In organised crime it’s a euphemism for extortion and predatory behaviour by criminals. 

This excellently illustrates and avoids the presistent problem of drinkers, trade association and beer writers confusing ownership with control that we have seen play out in the last decade or come of US craft brewery shell game. Show me the shareholders’ agreement!!

For Craft Beer & Brewing, Kate Bernot has a detailed update on Fonio, an small-scale farmed African cereal malted for brewing purposes that has gained acceptance since the 2018 introduction to Garrett Oliver described in this article in The Guardian as noted hereabouts back in 2023. Bernot shares some obervations that give a sense of what Fonio adds to a beer:

Vinnie Cilurzo, owner and brewer at Russian River in Windsor, California, agrees that fonio’s vinous, lychee-like contributions defy what most people—brewers and drinkers alike—expect from malt. A Belgian-style blonde ale brewed with 30 percent fonio has become a semiregular beer at Russian River’s taprooms—particularly during the warmer months, when its lean body and bright fruitiness feel especially appropriate. Cilurzo says it doesn’t take much fonio in the grist for it to have an impact. “My advice: You don’t have to go all the way to 30 percent,” he says. “Fifteen to 20 percent will also leave a thumbprint on the beer.”

What really struck me is how pale the beer in the accompanying image is. Pale as Zima. When my crime novels set in the early 1990s come out you’ll see me using that image: “I could tell he was guilty – he’d turned as pale as Zima.”

Never that way at all, we saw Stan’s latest Hop Queries hit the inbox last Friday including this note on production levels in Australia after the harvest there:

Reacting to diminishing worldwide demand for hops, Hop Products Australia continued to reduce acreage for 2026. Farmers strung 8.3% fewer acres and produced 11.7% fewer hops. They harvested almost 2.9 million pounds. For perspective, that’s equal to 3.4% of the US crop or to the amount of Mosaic farmers in the Yakima Valley harvested. 

As you consider the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” antipodean, here’s the notes:

Note #1: “…craft beer off 8% for latest 4 wks thru May 9…”
Note #2: a beer blog becomes, what, a booze blog?
Note #3: a return to beer writing?
Note #4: another return I’m pretty sure I don’t care about.

What is it with otherwise sane folk trying to scratch a living from a niche topic that leads them to speak of praise the niche’s given opp – the necessary “evil empire” to the purity of the niche – with all the eloquence of a six year old with stomach flu talking to Beulah on the big white telephone? I thought of that when I read this grab bag of sneering cliché:

“The Bad Beer That’s an Incredible Beverage” by Tyler Austin Harper is a bad piece that’s an incredible prism for understanding how beer can continue to thrive as a symbol of populist Americana even as it continues to lose market share to flavored malt beverages, canned cocktails, and whatever we’re calling Cayman Jack these days. Much like the New York Times Opinion section’s hackneyed forays into thinking critically about the trade, Harper’s take advances the argument that the craft brewing “movement” (such as it is) has gone too far. It’s a mixture of personal preference and surface-level cultural observation of a piece with the dreck David Chang was pushing in the pages of Esquire literally a dozen years ago.

If you’re going to shit on someone else’s writing it might be good to be interesting yourself as you do. Why is it so hard to understand that very few care about your chosen drinking hobby? With far greater clarity, ATJ has been trying to put his finger on what makes Belgian beer culture unique and, after years of looking beneath the surface, is not quite sure he’s been successful:

… thinking about Belgian beer culture I thought about beer and its associated obsessions — metal, gaming, men’s solitary hobbies, loneliness, the need to be someone else which ends in self-immolation (Brunhild trying to burn down the hall with Hagen and associates still inside perhaps?). Belgian beer culture, like beer culture, whether out in the cities and towns or in traditional bars or specialist beer joints, could be confusing, and I am not sure I found what I was looking for. Or did I?

And sticking with beer joint culture, a great barman has passed away in Chicago, Sam Sianis of the Billy Goat Tavern:

Millions of Americans knew of Mr. Sianis and his bar without ever crossing Chicago city limits, thanks to one of its most famous regulars, the syndicated columnist Mike Royko… Mr. Sianis made it an equal-opportunity establishment: Prolific drinkers, wayward pols, off-duty cabbies and the occasional celebrity all received the same friendly beer and a shot, often from Mr. Sianis himself. “Sam was the perfect host,” Don Rose, a journalist, said in an interview. In Mr. Royko’s columns, the Billy Goat became a font of tales, true and tall. Mr. Sianis once kicked out the same customer six times in one night for fighting while drunk. And Mr. Sianis swore he witnessed another man down 150 drinks in a sitting.

Another sort of fluid based establishment was the topic of Every Pub in Dublin‘s focus last Friday – pubs on islands you can only reach by boat and not via a bridge:

Arranmore’s 6 pubs is quite a lot for one island, and it has made me wonder about what other offshore (before someone comes and lists most of the pubs in Cork City…) island pubs there are. And also if I can actually tick all of those off too. This is not a promise to do that. I might, but I’m not guaranteeing I’ll do it it like I have with Dublin and also The Rosses. I’m going off the 2024-5 full licence file here, so there is a very high chance I’m missing somewhere, but I made a reference back to the 2010-11 file to try find any lost pubs too. I’m going to start North and work my way counter-clockwise here, so places I’ve been mostly work their way to the top…  I am also only counting islands you still need a boat to get to – I may have an Achill great-grandfather, but you’re basically mainlanders now!

It is even an island if there’s a bridge? Which leads to this interesting piece from BBC Worchestershire on the state of small breweries and what may be keeping some open:

Sarah Saleh, owner of The Hop Shed Brewery, in Suckley, Worcester, said: “Without the tap room we wouldn’t still be here. I think the breweries that are closing are the ones without a direct outlet for their beers.” Saleh continued: “I know when we set up here, 10 years ago, I can think of two breweries locally that were set up but didn’t have tap rooms, and they’re now no longer here. “It always amazes me that on a Friday night when the tap room is open, and we stand here in a barn in the middle of nowhere, and before you know it there’s 200 people here. “They’re enjoying food from local providers and enjoying the beer that’s been brewed here on site.

It is even a community brewery if there isn’t a taproom? Maybe. What else can make a brewery part of the community? Reporting from Norway, Knut attended a gathering of five Danish breweries invited by local Haandbryggeriet to show off their stuff… and one of the attendees had a particularly interesting back story:

Together with the Danish employment authorities, Stepping Stone has developed a program aimed at improving the conditions for refugees entering the Danish workforce. It is deliberately flexible — designed around the individual rather than the system. Each participant’s working hours, responsibilities, and workplace are shaped by their skills, needs, and current life situation, creating a more realistic and supportive path into employment. But the program doesn’t stop at work placements. Alongside hands-on experience at the brewery, participants are offered opportunities to build skills that extend beyond the job itself.

And also out and about has been Ed, who continues his reports from his trade mission to Austria, this time with his stop at Trumer of Saltzberg where he witnessed a method:

They have a six roller mill from 1965 and use the Kubessa method when brewing. Named after the brewer from Cologne that patented it in 1903, in the Kubessa method the husk is separated from the endosperm during milling. It is not added to the Mash Conversion Vessel during the early stages of mashing, only being added prior to lautering so it can help with wort separation. It means less husk polyphenols get in the beer. It’s said to make a beer taste more elegant, and certainly the Trumer Pils in Vienna was very smooth. We had John Brauer, EBC grand fromage, explain to us on the coach that in fact little difference can be detected in fresh beer, but the Kubessa method give greater flavour stability so its advantages become more apparent over time. 

That’s a lot of specific technical information. Mr. Gladman has shared some very specific emotional information, facts which he believes form the foundation for his love of Pastis:

On Saturdays I would walk the half-hour round trip there and back to spend my pocket money. I still remember filling the small white paper bag each week. It started off smooth and stiff then slowly softened and rumpled over the rest of the morning as I dipped into it for treats.I remember the aniseed balls best of all. I never bought too many — I didn’t want to spoil my enjoyment. The immediate pleasure of fizzy cola bottles was showy but no match for the deep joy of a well-sucked aniseed ball with its slow reveal, layer after intense layer, leading to that tiny black kernel of anise almost too challenging but all the better for it. I saved them for last because they would perfume the bag itself — you could smell them even after they were gone.

And, speaking of lingering aromas, Jeff gave us a history of the Cascade hops with his thoughts on what have made them so successful:

I’d add that Cascades have, ironically, come to achieve that quality of “nobility.” It’s true they’re more intense and robust than the old landrace varieties from Europe, but they’re also incredibly balanced and elegant. They offer a lovely bitterness, and are versatile as aroma hops (we’re going to get a taste of that in this year’s Oregon Homegrown collab.) When people taste Cascade, they’re tasting the same thing, too, which isn’t always the case with modern hops.

There. We will leave it there for this week and for this month. Soon it will be June with all that entails. Live it up. And again with this one last thing thing. Your weekly reminder that there will be an edition of The Session next month celebrating Martyn Cornell’s final book Porter and Stout: A Complete History. Boak and Bailey will share an update soon on when you need to get your thoughts organized in preparation.

Which means you, please, need to keep an eye on Boak and Bailey postings every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And do look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast.*

*No footnotes this week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s it for now. Report upon your tra-la-ing in the comments if you like. Until we meet again, please check out Boak and Bailey who are posting every Saturday and adding to their fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. And look out for more of Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, as noted, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword seems to be on pause since November but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube. Check out the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. See you in May!

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