Category: Contests

Welcome To 2026 And To The Exciting New Format Of The Thursday Beery News Notes!!

How’s your skull this New Year’s Day? Are you OK? Are you ready for some questions? Questions like: “is this the optimum alignment of the holidays?” Seem to me that a Wednesday New Year’s Eve pretty much guarantees that this week and last are a total write off work-wise. Unless you are in hospitality, of course. I am sure, by the way, that Sunday Christmas Day is the worst. Gotta put some sort of effort in the week before and you just get Monday off the week after. Glad I won’t have to deal with one of those weeks, when it’ll next shows up in 2033 when I will be long retired. That photo up there? A submission for the 2014 Holiday Beery Photo context received from Aaron Stein of Oregon. Aaron won the “Surprise Twist” award that year.*

First up, as we put 2025 on the shelf, it’s good to carefully consider your “best of” lists. It’s a tricky business finding the best of “best of” with plenty of the dubious. There are great ones like the Golden Pint Awards like this quite expansive one from Lisa Grimm that shares some happy news along with the useful insights:

… half of the family now Irish citizens (delighted!), and the rest midway through the naturalisation process, plus a book manuscript finished and in the production pipeline (finally!), as well as some exciting news on the employment…

Fabulous! And not just because of the heads up to my old hometown’s Garrison Brewing. And it doesn’t have to be all good news. Jeff posted his thoughts on 2025 and declared it “the worst year in my lifetime” with solid evidence supporting that view, before he moved on to the upsides, including:

The blog has been relatively healthy as well. Thanks to AI, online media sites are in real trouble. Google’s new AI summary means people don’t click through to websites, and traffic at some sites has fallen up to 50%. Traffic here, thanks to a strong finish to the year, has been basically flat—which is a lot better than I expected. Moreover, comments on the blog are way up, and it feels a lot more interactive these days. Thanks so much for contributing to the site!

But all lists aren’t all great. And there’s one category of useless which demands a PSA: the list of the unattainable. Not the luxurious as once in a while everyone can get their hands on something rather nice. No, I mean the sort of lists exemplified (but by no means limited to) by the beer writers’ short-run sample gift packs. Someone made 100 gallons of inguana poop stout and then couriered them to the gullible / needy / starving? Who cares. But this next sort of list, this here list of the 35 best pubs in Edinburgh? The best. Accessible. Useful. Helpful, even. And should be prepared by every topic hobbiest out there for their fair city or region.** Just look at the common sense info succinctly provided:

4. The Holyrood 9A – Round the corner at the bottom of St Mary’s Street towards the parliament building, a surprisingly bustling beer and burger den, with impressive selections of both. Food is prepared in the tiniest kitchen somewhere downstairs and served in the packed backroom or bar itself. Huge range of draught beers but also wines by the glass. An all-round good pub. Details: 9a Holyrood Road, theholyrood.co.uk

I know this is correct as I’ve been there, the cousins being just a route 128 bus ride away. One of my great regrets is not getting a photo of that kitchen as I walked out. I know, I let you down. But it is so small that you’d have to have the camera in their face. Little more than a cloakroom by the front door.

Another great format for the best of is the “stashkiller” mode, this week deployed by Barry Masterson in Cider Review:

There’s nothing new about this, we’ve all been there. You get a nice bottle of cider, or maybe it’s a beer or wine, and you think to yourself “yeah, I’ll keep that for a special occasion”. And this happens again and again, ad nauseam, until you’ve got a stash of special bottles built up that you’re almost afraid to dip into it as that special occasion just never came. It’s a funny thing, really, that with some things we think we need an excuse, when the fact is they have been made to be consumed, enjoyed, shared. In my case, when prowling the cellar for a drink at the end of a day’s work, I usually end up just reaching for a bottle of pils from the stack of crates because I feel I should be sharing the large bottles of cider, or if I open one I must be making notes, and that sometimes feels like work. It’s a terrible attitude when you have a cellar full of cider; it’s made to be drunk!

JD TBN has shared his extensive Golden Pint Awards, with characteristically  impressive level of detail in the 25 categories including ten related to specific beers as well as others such as:

Best Beer Blog or Website: The Drunken Destrier – I had this flagged for greatness since the spring, but the flurry of entertaining beer reviews petered out in late May. In the hope of some revived activity — I mean, how hard is it to drink a beer and write down what it tastes like? — I’m slinging a Golden Pint in Kill’s direction.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: barmas.bsky.social – Yeah, it’s mostly for the dog pictures, but you knew that.

I think Simon would have accepted the broader application of the otherwise tightly defined term “Twitterer”.  In DC, Jake Berg of DC Beer published his annual top beer and top music of 2025 – in not that order at all:

How this works: I pretty much only use the blog for this yearly post. I’ve got a bunch of music I liked this year with pithy comments that may or may not make sense to outside readers, interspersed with some songs I liked. Then I’ve got beer. You like beer, don’t you? This year there’s a pretty clear top two for me; both of these are excellent. After that I’m less sure, but tried to settle on an order because ranking things is fun. 

On thing we see less of in these annual lists (that itself needs a comeback) is the the in and out list or what is hot and what is not, like the one suggested at Everyday Drinking. But maybe that’s because I know what black currant tastes like. And here’s another sort of handy guide, particularly useful on this New Year’s Day. Lew Bryson on his podcast “Seen Through A Glass” on all your coffee booze options:

So I’m here with a whole bunch of coffee drinks to get going this morning!  I didn’t know what to do for a relaxed post-Christmas episode, and then I remembered this interview with John Mleziva of State Line Distillery. They make a great coffee liqueur, and we talked about that. I knew we’d be just sitting around drinking coffee on that morning after Christmas, so I made that into an episode.  Then I told you more about the press trip to Mexico I took back in 2011 to see how Kahlua is made, with all the feels, and all the delicioso, and the extra-special cocktail we learned how to make. And the donkey herb moonshine we had. Yeah, not a typo. 

For what it’s worth, get a nice winey coffee blend, add 10% cream and a splash of Chambord. Or maybe Cointreau but that’s sorta a regular Saturday thing if you ask me. Black coffee though the week, by the way.

Boak and Bailey helped put things in order in a different sense with their post on what beers for Christmas mean to them now:

There were a couple of factors behind our decision. For a start, there’s the question of what’s easiest for non-beer-geek family members to acquire and look after. We don’t want to be pains in the arse. We also find ourselves thinking about relatives might also actually enjoy drinking with us. Normalish ale and normalish lager are easy sells to almost anyone, and stay out of the way of conversation, board games, or Lethal Weapon II on the telly. Maybe nostalgia and sentiment kicked in a bit, too. Ray’s dad got quite into Cheddar Gorge Best in his final years and it was nice to feel that, in a way, we were still able to share a beer with him. We raised our glasses in the direction of his photo.

I am with them. I saw someone recommend a beer store somewhere where the cheapest offering was two and a half times the price of a very good Belgian ale and, being in the holiday mood, though to myself… WTF!! I think there may be a bit of embarassment about the sucker juice era but rather than knaw at one’s innards about the waste of a decade, do what B+B did and think of what the company you’ll be in. That’s what actual beer as social lubricant means, after all. Now… some quick notes:

Note #1: Ron pointed to a news item on the end of corked Guinness.
Note #2: Liam then explained the news item on the end of corked Guinness.
Note #3: read Bounded by Buns by the noted beerman… as, frankly, you really need to add some solid food to your diet.
Note #4: needing something to do on Jan 11th? Tune into Desi Pubs.

More news out of Britain on the relaxation of concern related to drinking and driving. In The Times this week we read:

A survey of more than 2,000 adults, including 1,300 drivers, found that 37 per cent of Generation Z believed it was more socially acceptable to drive when marginally over the legal limit, compared with 9 per cent of baby boomers. Across the population as a whole, only 21 per cent of people agree… The survey showed that more than a third of young drivers believed driving while slightly over the limit was acceptable, but also that they were twice as likely to think that alcohol did not impair their judgment. [Ed.: thankfully…] The number of young drivers obtaining their licence is at its lowest level for generations, partly because of the cost of lessons and the difficulties in getting a test.

Much is made of the lowering of the blood alcohol limit in England to match the rest of Europe but that last stat up there may indicate a truth – there might also be a general level of ignorance related to the risks of driving itself at play. And now… some more quick notes:

Note #5: a collab on the bit heading to the recycling bin?
Note #6: “RESIGN!!!”
Note #7: “…number of pubs in England and Wales… fell to 38,623 from 38,989 a year earlier…”

Not at all related, the business resource The Street has chosen “the craft beer apocalypse” as its descriptor for 2025, illustrating that claim with a couple of non-bankruptcies:

One of the most recent closings was Miamisburg, Ohio, craft brewery Entropy Brewing Company, which revealed on social media that it would close down its business permanently on Dec. 27, 2025, with no plans yet to file for bankruptcy… And now, New Mexico-based Bosque Brewing Company is closing down all of its taproom locations and ending its business after a federal judge dismissed the brewer’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy case on Dec. 22 because it had too much debt to reorganize, KOB-TV 4 in Albuquerque reported. The dismissal of the Chapter 11 case will likely prompt the brewery company to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation unless it can settle all of its debts with its creditors out of court.

AKA no hope of resuscitation. It seems to me that there might be a role for a bit of bankruptcy trustee advice for breweries in trouble at an earlier point in the downward cycle than “too much debt” but there seems to be a bit of a theme if we consider how late Rogue played along.  Before perhaps hitting the intersection of economics and ethics. Perhaps related (but only if you glean more from this passage than I do) is this offering from Gunnar Rundgren at countercurrents.org:

…society, human expression and technology develop in tandem. And in order to be strong they need to reinforce each other. And one technology assumes, or dictates, that many other technologies are in place and that society is organised in certain ways. Even something basic as beer assumes agriculture, and agriculture assumes and requires a sedentary culture. Sedentism, in turn, implies a lot of things, even though I don’t subscribe to the idea that agriculture and sedentism is the fall of man, the cradle of tyranny or the broken link between humans and nature. Some claim that beer preceded or even initiated agriculture and sedentism in that case means that it is beer that is the culprit, quite an entertaining thought….

So… if beer created civilization*** then beer is also complicit with the end of civilization. Perhaps. Shifting gears and in sensible rejection of last week’s sharing of bad advice about Dry January, this article in the New York Times may illustrate how dry does not need to mean no customers if there’s an application of a little planning to serve those cutting back:

Given that drinking — on the slopes, at the pool, or at the hotel bar — is for many people a staple while on holiday, forgoing the ritual leaves time for other activities. Here are six hotels that have devised alternatives to drinking, from snowshoeing to aerial stretching; from making mocktails to simply sipping them… The 54 rooms and suites spread across seven lodges are light-filled, with neutral-colored linens, Hästens beds and natural oak wood floors… A sustainable ethos guides the vision for the property, including its three restaurants. The extensive mocktail menu, which features zero-proof counterparts of its signature cocktails, leverages local ingredients and scraps from the kitchen. A mocktail called Too Hot to Handle, for example, is a umami-forward mix of Rebels Botanical Dry, a nonalcoholic gin; lemon; bell peppers; tomato and smoky housemade bitters.

Horsehair beds? Kitchen scraps in the drinks?!? OK… fine… maybe not so much… Speaking of retreats, like you, I read the Luxembourg Times. Where else can I catch up with the regional news of the Trappists fame… republished from Bloomberg… including some interesting technical insights from Westmalle:

The idea is to hold profit and production stable, to provide for the abbey, give to charity, and reinvest where necessary in the business. Westmalle’s bottling plant hums and crashes with life during the day as bottles are washed, labeled, filled and prepared for delivery. At maximum capacity, 45,000 are processed per minute. But the production line lies idle outside its one day shift, and doesn’t operate on weekends, as the monks want the staff to work sociable hours. It’s set to be replaced by 2030 with a new modernized facility through a major, self-funded investment in the brewery.

Mod-ren. That’s what the future will be. Mod-ren. Speaking of which… that is it for this first update of 2025.  Frig. I forgot to use the new format. Oh well. Have a great New Years Eve and Hogmanay, too! Excitement builds as it’s not yest been announced if Boak and Bailey are posting this Saturday but make it your New Year’s resolution to sign up for their fabulously entertaining footnotes 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 2007!! 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 has returned from his break since April so you can embrace the sweary Mary! 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.

*From the Wayback archives, here is the explanation of the Surprise Twist: “I feel a 1980s power ballad coming on. I can’t fight this feeling anymore. Maybe I was just so damn tired. I was checking out all the entries and just like that I heard a voice. It said: “Hello, is it me you’re looking for?” I dunno. This time I wanna be sure. Suddenly, it’s touching the very part of me. It’s making my soul sing. It says the words that I can’t say. Maybe little things I should have said and done. I guess I just never took the time. When it was thinking about prize giving this was always on my mind… always on my mind. I’m never gonna dance again if I don’t make this right. Aaron Stein of Portland, Oregon wins. Not sure what he wins. But he wins the book I need to dig out award for the overlooked image of 2014.” That’s… a lot. Wow. Was I drunk?
**Consider B+B’s Bristol or (for the double!) Lisa’s Dublin.
***Didn’t.

Your Merriest Of Merry Christmas Day Beery News Notes For 2025

Stan has been worried. Very worried. Either worried that there would not be any beery news notes this Chrismas Day or worried that there would be beery news notes today and that I really should be doing something else. I am deeply appreciative of the concern but as I usually farm this all out to the team of sleep deprived unpaid interns there is no question whatsoever of the news getting to each of you, my gentle and today hopefully mildly hungover while turkey and stuffing compromised readers. So… the show goes on! Speaking of which, todays photo above from the Yuletide photo contest was submitted by Zak Rotello of the Olympic Tavern of Rockford Illinois, a long time pal of this here beer blog. Click on it for a bigger version. It’s an image of a member of the brewer staff cleaning open fermenters at Anchor Brewing in San Francisco, the brewery that will now never reopen. Like the sleep deprived unpaid interns, we remember those who are working today to keep the holidays jolly.

So what news is actually out there this week? We might have slim pickin’s but there shall be pickin’s. First up, what days are your local party days? As mentioned last year, Tuesday was Tibb’s Eve in Newfoundland last Tuesday. And this is the first year I saw a lot of references to “Black Friday” for the last Friday before Christmas as opposed to the first Friday after U.S. Thanksgiving. Here, for example, is the new coverage from Wales.  Mainly photos of the dressed up and drunk yuff today. It also seems to be referred to as “Mad Friday” in Scotland but maybe it’s a phrase able to be swapped out. I share the thumbnail attached as evidence that such stuff happens in Canada but perhaps with a little more grace as well as perhaps a bit more grit. By the way, one assumes (given the obviously strong ankles) that such natty folk might also be hockey players so… a misplaces comment might receive an brisk elbow right to the Chiclets… if you know what I mean.

What else? The best booze stories of the year according to the Drinks Business included beer news including the high price of a pint in the UK, BrewDog ditching pubs and the suggestion that NA beer should be “a functional drink rather than a compromise…” whatever that means. Pellicle offered up its top tales of their very good year. And Ron has been posting about the best of his personal year including:

I did a bit of judging this year. Mostly in South America, obviously. That’s where I prefer to judge. The Blumenau contest was fun this year. And not in Blumenau. Instead, it was on the coast at Balneario Camboriu. Literally on the coast, as the judging location was on the seafront. Meaning you could have a stroll down the beach at lunchtime. So civilised. And I managed to dodge judging Best of Show. That’s always a win. In Santiago, judging was in the same hotel as we were staying. Which is always good.

Also good was his news that he’s been cutting back.  On a related note, the* Beer Nut on the expansion of NA beers that don’t suck:

Non-alcoholic beer gets the occasional bit of coverage on here, though I tend to find very few which perform the role required of a beer. Pale ales, wheat beers and lagers seem to be the preferred styles, which may be the problem. I’ve often said that dark styles make for better alcohol-free beer, my favourite to date being Švyturys Go Juodas, and the Guinness one is pretty decent too. The latter’s success has provided an opportunity for other breweries to get in on the 0.0 stout racket, and the first I’ve seen locally is Dundalk Bay’s Zero Zero Nitro Stout, available in Aldi.

I’ve recently bought into the “Guinness 0” thing so good news that other smaller operations are able to similarly pass muster. Speaking of news, Stan also had newsy news in his Hop Queries in the state of the US supply of hops:

Farmers in the Northwest reduced acreage 7% in 2025 and harvested 5% percent fewer hops, according to the USDA National Hop Report. Average yield per acre was the highest since 2011, when higher yielding hops appreciated more for their alpha made up a larger percentage of acres planted. The 2025 value of production was $447 million, up slightly from 2024, but significantly less than $662 million in 2021. That shouldn’t be a surprise, given that acreage has shrunk 31% since 2021 and production 28%. Perhaps as important, in September the USDA reported that the inventory of hops held by growers, dealers and brewers was 116 million pounds, down 15 percent from the previous year. That’s the largest contraction in 15 years and suggests the market is getting closer to being in balance. Still, it is a significant amount, and almost 40 percent higher than it was through much of the teens.

Me, I was higher in my teens. That’s the main difference between me and the US hops trade.

Note#1: “Stephen Beaumont once gave me some good advice: don’t.”
Note #2: “Scroll at your leisure…”
Note #3: Women in public bars over fifty years or so ago.
Note #4: Continental had a pub in the sky.
Note #5: Short pours in Milton Keynes!

Speaking of controversy, a debate threatened to break out in the comments at Boak and Bailey but it appeared to just be a slightly paranoid complainer intent on playing one handed ping pong, the prattling lad being handled firmly by the administration. Much more interesting were the comments confirming reality behind the sale of Bristol’s Moors, including:

I now have had a chance to dig into their structure and, in short, they were not employee-owned in the recognised sense of being owned by an employee ownership trust or being a co-op, etc – it was just that all of the owners were also employees (i.e. no external investors). Justin owned 85% of the business. It looks like he has now sold that stake to Albatronic Arcades Ltd, a company registered on 5 August 2025 and owned solely by Bruce Gray. So I feel less unnerved about the boycott! But still hope they can turn Moor around.

Another set of comments were helpful in building upon Jeff‘s thoughts on the shutting down of three of ABInBev’s megabreweries in the U.S. of A.:

At a macro level, overcapacity normally drives prices down, which is always hard on producers. It’s especially bad for breweries right now, which face a host of financial challenges. Craft and big beer function largely in separate realms, though, and it’s seemed like big beer has been able to replace lost beer volumes with flavored-malt beverages and the like. This news suggests otherwise. Further, for anyone who has followed the beer industry over the past fifty years or so, this is a shocking development for a financial and logistical juggernaut.

Not as shocking to one Karl “the Commentron”** Ockert who shared his understanding:

I worked at the Newark brewery, then a 9 million bbl per year plant, in the early 90’s. I (half) jokingly tell people that I earned my Masters at the university of AB, Newark campus. While I learned a lot of the science of brewing at UC Davis with Dr Lewis, at Newark I learned even more about production and process discipline which I was able to use at the BridgePort and Deschutes Breweries. Last year Newark was down to a rate of 500,000 bbls per year and brewing less than a week per month. Along with Fairfield and Merrimack, it fell victim to the changing beer market. I’m sure it was a painful decision to close all 3 breweries at once, and I’m sorry to see it finally happen.

One wonders what it was that kept the facilities hanging on for so long. Wasn’t money. Somewhat similarly was the concern raised by Ron about the loss this year of Martyn Cornell and state of Martyn’s now 404 website:

What did Martyn leave unfinished? I can’t believe that he wasn’t working on another book. (He asked me about self-publishing because he was so pissed off with how long it took to get a book published.) Not to go all fanboy, but (meaning I am doing) how much material is there that hasn’t been published? Including stuff chopped from Porter. I’d buy a book with that in. Niche, made possible by self-publishing.  A compilation of his, often very long, always hugely informative, blogposts would make a great book. And preserve them in print. As Zythophile is no longer there. Fuck. This material really needs to be saved. Maybe I should get in touch with his brother. 

Happy was I then to confirm that the contents of the entirely excellent Zythophile has been preserved at the Wayback Machine, a service which I have been in love with since the great blog server shift of 2016. Think something has been lost on the internet? Check the Wayback Machine first.

There was intrigue in England as we wondered if Mrs RM could walk past  one of the great conversational pubs:

Walking back from the Sun to Faversham Premier Inn on the eve of Mrs RM’s birthday I suddenly realised we’d taken a different route into town that afternoon and missed its most famous pub. Would she be able to resist the lure of the Elephant on first sight. No. “We’re going in there“. I was happy to skip it, honest. A year ago it was packed on Sunday folk afternoon, a bit quieter on Tuesday night but there still weren’t a lot of spare tables.

A pub full of chatters. Not always what one wants but good to see someone get their way.  In other situations, choosing beer can be the wrong move as this personal injury workers compensation claim denial illustrates:

The claimant’s business required them to purchase and transport bulk quantities, and as the pain apparently intensified the claimant was awarded income replacement benefits, the release says. Surveillance by investigators found the claimant was seen regularly transporting beer for seven to 10 hours every day, often loading up to 20 cases of beer into their vehicle without assistance or any evidence of pain. The benefits were terminated…

All this leads to one fact – beer is not always kosher. No, really. Not kosher:

In November, three of America’s largest kosher certifying organizations came together to release new guidance regarding the status of beer, which has long been considered kosher by default. Due to the proliferation of flavorings brought on by craft brewing and other industry changes, however, the rabbis who declare whether food products are in line with Jewish dietary laws now say the label must be checked before drinking. “We’ve discovered that companies use many flavors, different flavors, to enhance even the simple beers that they manufacture. Those flavors need to be kosherly supervised,” said Rabbi Moshe Elefant, the head of kosher operations at the Orthodox Union, who released the guidance along with Star-K and OK Kosher. “We’ve seen more than one situation… that some beers have dairy in them. They add lactose, they add milk, so a beer could be dairy, which has very serious kosher ramifications.”

Knew it. Gak. Yet some of the stuff that can be crammed into beer other than via the “craft” of the fruit sauce hose might actually be useful:

Buck isn’t just a home brewer dabbling in drug-making. He is a virologist at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., where he studies polyomaviruses, which have been linked to various cancers and to serious health problems for people with weakened immune systems. He discovered four of the 13 polyomaviruses known to infect humans. The vaccine beer experiment grew out of research Buck and colleagues have been doing to develop a traditional vaccine against polyomavirus.

As I mentioned last week, I am pro-line in the pub. Better, table service. Each to their own, I suppose, but is there any bore are boring as the “don’t queue” bore in a ‘Spoons?

Believing it’s an ‘unwritten rule’ that you don’t queue at a bar, the 24-year-old barman was stunned to spot ten people in an orderly line waiting for their drinks. Jack refused to join the queues, instead ‘standing his ground’, claiming he propped up the bar for 10 minutes until he was served. Baffled Jack, shared a snap of the queue on X, slamming it as a ‘disgusting and uncouth disregard for sacred tradition’… Jack, who lives in Birkenhead, Merseyside, said: “It’s going against British tradition and it’s just wrong. It’s not like they’re doing anything inherently bad but it’s an unwritten rule you don’t queue at a bar.

Finally – and looking forward to New Year’s resolution suggestions – a word on usage if I might. Please stop writing “I don’t understand” as it means… you are admitting you don’t understand. And if you are a professional writer and you use the phrase “trust me” it only shows you can’t clearly explain your views which means your views are likely not trustworthy. And ask yourself before hitting “publish” if it is wise to write “… an unimaginable amount of work goes into…” when not only was it imaginable but it was accomplished as imagined. And if you as a beer business person want to want to display your ignorance of the times and market conditions of your trade as it exists today, feel free to post something like this on LinkedIn:

Given the current state of the industry, I think it’s about time we rally together and finally retire “Dry January.” Honestly, hasn’t it taken up more spotlight than anything that fun-free should? Let’s change the narrative and remind people what beer actually is……. a simple, natural combination of water, malted grains, hops, and yeast. Four ingredients. Zero mystery. This is our heritage. It’s real, it’s straightforward, and frankly, it deserves a comeback tour. Let’s make it happen and get things moving in the right direction!!!

Seeing as the “industry” didn’t start Dry January how exactly the hell does this person propose that it retire the concept. Plus… “a simple natural combination“? Yes, let’s go out in nature and find some beer, shall we? Displaying further ignorance on the brewing processing is another not strong move.

And that’s it! Stan will either be satisfied or concerned. The interns are using all resources to seek further clarifications on the question. No Christmas for them! And as we enter deeper into the holiday week lull, please also remember that Boak and Bailey are not posting this Saturday so we also will do without their fabulously entertaining footnotes, too. Sitll, look out for Stan’s new “One Link, One Paragraph” format. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2007!! 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 has returned from his break since April so you can embrace the sweary Mary! 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.

*I am always torn. Sweat forms on the brow. Does one capitalize the “t”?
**The title reserved only for the most experienced of comment makers.

Your Festive Beery News Notes For A Blursday In This Jolly Hollifest

What day is it? I think I can still recall. It’s definitely somewhere between the last parcel being mailed and 2026. I know that much. I also know that in 2009 one Stan Hieronymus, possibly barely out of his teens at the time, submitted this photo above as one of his entries in the Christmas photo context. I will say one thing about a beer photo contest – if you don’t like your range of browns you might as well admit that you should never run one. Like the other contest submissions I have been posting out of the archives the last few weeks, I am pretty sure this one didn’t win a prize – but have you ever seen a better placement of a five gallon white food service bucket? No. Come to think of it, do you ever give a second thought for the glorious role of the five gallon food service bucket in all of brewing? Stan did. For one beautiful moment, he sure did.

Let’s get to the beer news. First up, another controversy related to booze and the ticker:

…the American Heart Association has revived the idea in a scientific review that is drawing intense criticism, setting off a new round of debate about alcohol consumption. The paper, which sought to summarize the latest research and was aimed at practicing cardiologists, concluded that light drinking — one to two drinks a day — posed no risk for coronary disease, stroke, sudden death and possibly heart failure, and may even reduce the risk of developing these conditions.

Before you go off to the Christmas office party with the thought that it’s really not all that far off a visit to a health spa, remember the critics’ warnings about the quality of all these sorts of studies: “Some are clearly horrible, some are good, but a lot are in the gray zone, and people may just cherry-pick and select those that agree more with their narrative.” Hah! So there…

Speaking of the office party at this time of year, the very same authoritative organ shared a bit of advice about conduct at office parties for the supervisory set:

It’s a good idea to stop after two drinks. Sure, you could have three drinks — or six! — and enjoy the social leveling and bonhomie that accompanies lowered inhibition and decreased cognitive capacity. But it’s hard to command respect in the office when people have seen you red-faced and trying to light a cigarette from the filter. 

Is it unfair to compare today to forty or so years ago? The (other) Times did this week when they republished a guide called “How to Survive Christmas” from 1986:

Commuting in the run-up to Christmas is absolute murder. On the way home from a hard day’s work you are liable to find everyone either festively drunk or helping someone else to be sick. Then there’s the office party. People will drink far too much, lunge at one another, tell the managing director he’s a twerp and pour the office vegan’s sprout wine down the word processor to cackles of mirth. How do susceptible males stay out of trouble at the office party? One friend suggests that offices should introduce Tube straps hanging from the ceiling. Thus you could remain vertical however much you knocked back, but with one hand in the strap and the other clutching your glass, both would be kept out of mischief.

Good idea. While it appears that thirty-nine years have passed since that was published, it’s clear ther are still bad behaviours that need to be stamped out at this Holly Jolly time of year, as Pete reports from the pub:

Black Friday has a different meaning in the hospitality industry. It’s not the consumer frenzy of late November, it’s the last Friday before Christmas. This is the night when post-work drinks climax in a frenzy of ill-advised shots and poorly judged flirting. For pubs, it’s one of the busiest nights of the year.

And then he gives ten rules, many of which would be enough to deter me from going to the pub. No line? Never have liked that when visting the fam. How un-Canadian! Give me a good line any day. But “no ordering a round of cocktails“? Perfect sense. No playing your crap music off your phone? Automatic ejection, I say.

Speaking of bad behaviour, I missed this tale of sticky fingers a few weeks ago but I will share it now as this could end up being quite the thing… perhaps quite the thing indeed:

Molson Canada has accused former managers of embezzling millions of dollars in an intricate fraud scheme allegedly involving fake vendors, shell companies, the president of a major pub chain and a pair of married couples. In documents filed Wednesday in Ontario Superior Court, the brewing giant claimed that former Molson Canada sales director Frank Ivankovic oversaw “a complex scheme to defraud the company of many millions of dollars” that later involved two subordinates.

Holy crap! Gotta watch that story. You may scoff at the very thought but I will share a fact that is actually true – I had a personal banking representative many years ago who made a very tidy sums on false mortgage accounts until the scam was uncovered. As this situation at Molson is reportedly both complex and intricate, I am spellbound and await further disclosures from any and all court processes.

Speaking of people who can’t tell their left pocket from their right one, in the land of Vinho Verde the police have had to get involved:

Those arrested from the trade body, which is responsible for quality control and official certification of Vinho Verde wines, belong to its Inspection and Control Division, with the individuals arrested for allegedly warning wineries of upcoming inspections and accepting bribes of meals, wine and event tickets. According to Portuguese newspaper Jornal de Notícias, the officials also allegedly turned a blind eye to wine producers failing to meet the requirements to obtain designation of origin (DO) or geographical indication (IG) certification to be able to label their bottles as Vinho Verde…  Meanwhile, a further four “business owners involved in the distribution and production of Vinho Verde” – have also been arrested, charged with “active and passive corruption, falsification of documents and abuse of power”.

Doce mãe de deus!!!  Fiddling with the Vinho Verde!?! That has been a mainstay in my life for around forty-five years, starting with my mother’s micro-obsession with the plonky version. Not unrelatedly as it turns out, Lars found some dirt about law scoff doing a little farmhouse brewing in Japan, news that he shared on BlueSky:

The Japanese are less law-abiding than I thought: farmhouse sake brewing continued despite the legal ban. In 1941 folklorists surveyed 85 localities, finding home brewing in 44 of them…  In 1895 there were 1 million home brewing licenses in total. So Japan definitely had farmhouse brewing of sake. Then in 1886 the gov’t banned home brewing entirely. Probably killed the farmhouse brewing. Home brewing is still illegal in Japan (gov’t wants its alcohol taxes), but in 2003 one exception was made: farms using their own rice are allowed to brew. This kind of sake is called “doburoku”. There are now 100 designated doburoku districts where this style exists.

That could make for something very interesting, a doburoku tour… doburoku tour… doburoku… WAKE UP!!! Sorry. Now… some notes:

Note #1: “only 37 percent of craft breweries in Canada are profitable”? Really? That’s a lot of subsidization.
Note #2: Who the hell pours Bailey’s down the sink?
Note#3: A.I. designed beer? Nope, couldn’t care less…

Aaaaannnnnd… the BA issued a somewhat delicately drafted “year in review” type press release suited to both address and deflect the industry’s annus horribilis and, I gotta tell ya, I sorta choked on what is stated to be the top trend:

This year, there was a continued democratization and expansion of what it means to be a “brewer.” With acquisitions, mergers, and collaborations, the stainless tanks in the background may not be as important as the brand story.

As one who has never given a shit about the story someone is telling about a brewery, I think if I were an actual brewer I might consider this statement slightly, you know, treachery if not treasonous. But it is nice to know that, finally, years after the BA’s abandoning the need to be small or traditional or independent it’s now not even necessary to be an actual brewer.

Much more reliable was the annual release of the Golden Pints 2025 awards from Boak and Bailey which starts with this introduction to the concept.

What can we say? Hardly anybody else bothers doing this anymore but we’re creatures of habit. We first took part in the Golden Pints back in 2011 and find it a pleasingly reassuring ritual. It’s also good to have in mind throughout the year as we roam from town to town, and from pub to pub. It makes us look at the beer we’re drinking and ask: “Could this be a contender?” Before we get down to business, a bit of encouragement: nobody owns the Golden Pints thing; anyone can join in; you don’t even need a blog to take part. Post your own list on social media as a thread, or even in the comments on this post if you like.

I won’t ruin the announcement of their winners – but what I like about the whole Golden Pints idea is that it celebrates their winners. Was it started by the late great Simon Johnson? He posted his thoughts in 2010, 2011 and 2012 but perhaps it goes back further. Yes, Mark Dredge awarded them in 2009 and even cited his own pre-GP “best of” post of 2008. Who was his best beer Twitterer of 2009? Simon Johnson! Who else? Anyway, you can check out the examples new and old and figure out your own summary of the year according to your own standards.

In another annual year end tradition, Alistair has begun to announce his beers of the year, style by style. His first post celebrates the pale based on three footprints – state, national and imports:

It’s that time of the year, the Winter Solstice is upon us, and what better to do than to review a year’s worth of drinking? As has become my own tradition, I will break this down into multiple posts, one for pale beer, one for BOAB (“between orange and brown”, and dark, and then an overall beer of the year, as well as one for Virginia cider of the year. As I have done for several years now, I will highlight beers from Virginia, the rest of the US, and the rest of the world before crowning each category winner, so on with the show…

I liked this comment: “Spoolboy, the most perfect desítka imaginable, and one that I wish I could sit and drink with Evan, Max, and co back in Prague.” That would be a good table to join.

Over at Pellicle, Robyn Gilmour shared the story of an innovation in Dublin’s beer scene:

…the beer that’s consumed in the majority of Irish pubs isn’t even Irish, with the exception, perhaps, of Guinness, Murphy’s, Beamish, and a handful of other outliers that are brewed locally but owned by foreign multinationals. While treasured in Ireland, these brands do not represent the full spectrum of the country’s beer, which is far more nuanced and varied than most pub offerings would suggest. Speak to anyone working in the independent Irish brewing sector and they’ll soon tell you about the savage competition for taps in Ireland—primarily between Diageo, Heineken, and Molson Coors. As someone who’s worked with many of these smaller breweries, I’ll admit I never had prior reason to question where publicans fitted into this dynamic. That was until 2024, when 16 of Dublin’s most cherished pubs banded together to form a brewery of their own—the aptly named Changing Times.

Finally, David shared his thoughts on language and alcohol promotion, thoughts based on serious personal experience:

…this kind of communication is terrible in the run up to Christmas when more people are tempted into drink driving despite the messaging. Recalling the trauma caused by my dad drink driving was bad enough but only days later I was forced into recollecting my flatmate’s attempted suicide when BrewDog ran an advertising campaign with the slogan “tastes like commercial suicide”. 

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, much of my experience with drunk driving was from an earlier stage in my professional career as a duty criminal defence counsel processing those passing before the court for judgement. But I also lost a client of our office every year to a drunk driver in those years, too. And I probably have to admit that up to a certain point growing up in Nova Scotia in the 1970s and 80s, drunk driving was so common there was an inevitable even blasé attititude to the tragic harms done. There were so many Mondays that someone was not at their locker. So I don’t buy arguments that there is a risk reward sweet spot in these matters. The vast sums that the booze trade offers do not offset the loss.

And that may sound like a bummer of a way to end the news notes for the lead up to Christmas but this is a high danger zone within the calendar for drunk driving and other forms of harmful behaviours. So be thoughtful and be safe as you do about the holiday partying in these next few weeks. Maybe think of what else can be done that is as helpful as a London Underground strap hanging from the ceiling to make sure the season actually remains jolly.

As you contemplate that, please also check out, Boak and Bailey on this and every Saturday and then sign up for their entertaining footnotes, too. Look out for Stan when he feels the urge (now that he’s “retired” from beery news posts) from Budapest or wherever – as he is getting active again. Then 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 has returned from his break since April so you can embrace the sweary Mary! 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.

 

Two Weeks?!? It’s The “TWOOOO WEEEEEEEKSSSS TO GO!!!!” So Excited Dontcha Know Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

As I mentioned last week, I am sharing some past submissions from the Yuletide Christmas Boxing Day Hanukka Kwanza New Years Eve and Hogmanay Beery Photo Contests that have been sitting in my email folders from all those years years gone by. This week a photo from 2012’s bare knuckle brawl sent in by Jeff Wayne of Tampa, FL. Not necessarily the prettiest image but that there is the leaky bung of a fermenting barrel aged chocolate stout, a celebration of a full range of browns. I like it. Just hope someone spooned up that excess chocolate.

Yes, here we are two weeks from the big day. The day I drink sherry at 8 am and have cake for breakfast. Excitement builds. Also building is Eoghan‘s Advent calendar of things seen in about the 19 communes of Brussels, including at the bewilderingly queter edges of the town:

The streets were so big, wide plains of asphalt, fringed by large standalone houses between was too much air. And the air too was different, smoky and rich but not in an oppressive, attack-your-throat sense, more luxurious. The topography too, big dips and vertiginous climbs with houses and apartment blocks ranged on their slopes, not at all like the slow and steady – but just as taxing – hills I’m more used to traversing in downtown Brussels. I didn’t even know if I was in Watermael or Boitsfort… The bar was, when I finally found it, comfortingly familiar. A Brussels that was recognisable to me however far from the centre I might have strayed, with beer in the fridges I knew and breweries on the taps I trusted. I was at last on terra firma…

Also out wandering, ATJ captured something of the essence of being ATJ in this passage from his travel diary this week:

The soundtrack on this late morning in a Bamberg pub is of laughter and calls and joy growls in the main bar, alongside the clatter and bang of cutlery and plates in the kitchen. The aroma of roast meat, intense in its intimacy, flits through the room, an escape from the kitchen, like a spirit from its long locked stronghold. I sense, or perhaps create, a Friday midday feeling, the joviality of the approaching weekend, though for me, having left home the previous Sunday and perambulated through Prague, nuzzled myself into Nuremberg’s hidden corners and currently based for a day in Bamberg, there is no conception of a weekend, time is just drifting by with the conscience of a cloud.

Not unlike Willie W., when one weighs the words. Anthony Gladman has also being weighing the situation, in this case for cask, and finds that something is lacking:

Cask ale’s slow drift away from relevance saddens me. I fear we seem set to lose it altogether, and shall be culturally diminished as a result. And the worst thing about it is this: the younger drinkers who choose not to drink cask ale are doing nothing wrong. It simply isn’t relevant to them. Nor is this their failing; it is the beer’s and the brewers’ and the pub landlords’. And perhaps partly also mine, as a drinks writer, for failing to make its case often enough, loudly enough, or persuasively enough.

Bingo. I have never understood writers complaining how folk don’t understand this thing or that. It is the job of the writer to make it compelling. Has cask suffered solely on that basis? Nope. But it hasn’t helped.

Well, conversely, this news either means it is no longer a fad or the shark has jumped on no-lo beer as, according to The Guardian, AB InBev is created the world’s largest alcohol-free brewing facility in Wales:

A “de-alcoholisation facility” sounds like somewhere to check in after a boozy Christmas, but in the new annexe of a brewery in south Wales they are extracting hangovers from beer. With demand for no-alcohol and low-alcohol (“nolo”) beer taking off in the UK, the hi-tech brewing apparatus enables the plant at Magor, which produces more than 1bn pints of Budweiser, Corona and Stella Artois a year, to make the increasingly popular teetotal versions too… The availability of alcohol-free beers on tap in pubs is expected to further normalise the choice.

We are assured that “the machine treats the beer very sensitively and delivers a fantastic taste”. Normally I would laugh, say things like “….riiiiight…” and move on but… I just had my first four pack of Guinness 0 and will definitely buy another. What happened? Maybe I got normalized. Try it with port. But no-lo’s not quite as socially acceptable everywhere as The Times notes this amongst its list of conversation topics you will be annoyed by at parties this holiday season:

At every party there are now soooo many men with soooo many helpful tips and advice on the great alcohol-free beers they know all about and which they are categorically not drinking tonight. For some reason it’s always the most sloshed blokes who have the most to say about sober alternatives. It’s like getting nutrition advice from the morbidly obese.

Don’t be the beer bore. Ever. Never one to be that, Alistair shared a happy memory of the time he helped brew, :

This Thursday is the 15th anniversary of the day I spent at Devils Backbone Basecamp brewing the first ever batch of Morana, a Czech style dark lager that I designed for them. I had spent the previous months diving into archives, emailing with multiple brewers, and beer experts, in various languages – English, German, Czech, and Slovak – to learn everything I could about a family of beers that at the time only consisted of about 5% of Czech beer production. Obviously, having only fairly recently decamped from Prague to Virginia, I was also relying on my own remembrances of beers that I had got a taste for in the last couple of years there, when I moved beyond the realms of Gambrinus, Staropramen, and Velkopopovivký Kozel.

Alistair says that the beer that was “the first authentic Czech style dark lager brewed in the modern American craft brewing industry” which is a decent claim to fame. Perhaps also decent was the stout presented to The Beer Nut whose analysis went deep into the dark:

Unsurprising given the froth, it’s quite fizzy: a little too much for the style, I think, giving it a thin and sharp quality that doesn’t suit strong stout. The rum element is present in the flavour, but subtle. I tend not to like rum-aged beers, finding the spirit cloyingly sweet, but that isn’t the case here. Instead, the barrels add more of that fruitcake or Christmas pudding quality I found in the aroma, as well as a rawer oaken sappiness. None of this overrules the base beer, which is a no-nonsense, properly bitter, grown-up stout: dark toast, a molasses sweet side and then a finish of punchy spinach and green cabbage leaf. The can says it’s 48 IBUs; it tastes like considerably more. This is quality stuff, and I’m always happy to find a modern stout that goes big without resorting to silliness. The fizz is its one flaw, and I found myself doing a lot of swirling to try and knock that out. It only reached an acceptable level of smoothness around the time I finished it.

I wish I had one flaw. Not quite indecent is the focus of this article on how to win back the disinterested youth of today:

“Because craft beer sales skew towards older consumers, it’s vital to keep nurturing the next generations of buyers. Gen Zers can be hard to reach and their sentiments are shifting but responding to their needs can help brewers grow share”… Gen Z prefers different drinking environments from older groups. Experiential bars and high-energy venues hold much higher appeal and may offer the strongest opportunity to introduce them to craft. While casual dining restaurants, neighbourhood bars and sports bars remain important to the wider craft drinker base, Gen Z is markedly less likely to visit taprooms and brew pubs, which limits the impact of traditional brewery-led spaces.”

That’s not good. Not only are they not interested in your product but it appears they have no interest in your product. Is there an issue with seeing to bring back the relationship? Even though the sins of the father haven’t been visited on the generation that followed? It all sounds like an earlier 1970s slow slow dance classic, perhaps a little Hall and Oates:

She’s gone (she’s gone)Oh I, oh I, I better learn how to face itShe’s gone (she’s gone)Oh I, oh I, I’d pay the devil to replace herShe’s gone (she’s gone), oh IWhat went wrong?

Pay the devil indeed. Or the invoicing consultant offering solutions. Solutions… yup, that’s what they are. Conversely, being straight with what has really gone on is part of the story for Anaïs Lecoq this week in Pellicle who writes about the Franco-fascists fascination with wine:

Tradition is a lie. And it’s the same lie, fuelled by carefully curated storytelling, that the far-right is trying to feed us now. They wear black berets, big mustaches, and suspenders. They hang up French flags, and talk about meat and wine as the epitome of French food, not missing the opportunity to ridicule vegans and mock people who don’t drink alcohol. They’re terroir influencers, born out of the rise of conservatism and general backlash against social progress. What they’re doing has a name: gastronationalism, or culinary nationalism, which refers to the way food—its history, production and consumption—is used to promote nationalism and define national identity.

It does make sense in that wine requires landowners’ estates as much as beer requires peace. And serfs or their facsimile to do the work. A hotter bed for the old goosesteppers that other spots… perhaps. Next up… a palate clenser with some cheater quick notes:

Note #1: The practice of “faire chabrot” can easily be added to your Yuletide feast traditions;
Note #2: A review of Martyn Cornell’s Porter & Stout: A Complete History by The Beer Nut;*
Note #3: “If there’s ever been a bellwether to the state of the crafts beer industry, it’s Mitch freaking Steele job hunting“;
Note #4: Wine drinking as resistence; and
Note #5: Beer drinking as obedience.

Back on the endtimes beat, Dave Infante neatly summarized the evidence he’s uncovered of a wobbly situation at Pabst:

…the company is quietly looking for a subletter to take over its headquarters in San Antonio. A listing I reviewed for the sleek space—into which Pabst just moved in 2023—was last updated just two days before the pink slips started flying this past Thursday. Between the layoffs, the listing, and a whole lot of reshuffling in Pabst’s c-suite (including the replacement of both chief executive and chief financial officers earlier this year, and the exit of a former chief sales officer just last month), former Pabst employees I spoke with fear the legacy firm might be on the brink.

Yikes. Somewhat relatedly, The Mirror in the UK ran an article on the cost of all aspects of the price of a UK pint and came to a curious conclusion:

Citing figures from the British Beer and Pub Association, Michael said this means pubs are making a total gross profit per pint of £3.69. However… “That’s before VAT, which is another 83 pence – and we have to factor in staff wages, which is another £1.17 per pint…” duty paid to the brewer equates to another 56 pence, as well as business rates of 35 pence, and employment tax for all pub staff at 29 pence…. pub overheads and utilities at 36 pence per pint, which leaves just 13 pence of net profit per pint sold – and this why around 30 pubs are closing every month.” As a percentage this profit equates to just 2.5 per cent.

I find these sorts of supposedly accurate breakdowns useless.** What wasn’t made clear is why pubs which make a 2.5% profit are closing. Is that why they close? Or unidentified expenses were left out or that level of income after expenses is not satisfactory. Which may be the case. But it wasn’t what was argued.*** Time for something more compelling? You got it!

Note #6: HOT PICKLED PORTER!!!

Much more seriously, Boak and Bailey‘s footnotes last week pointed me to the newsletter from Jen Blair on influencers in beer and their choice of appearance:

A few months ago, I was at a beer festival talking with some people I had just met. At one point, one of the men in the group stated that he thinks it’s shameful when women post “provocative” beer photos on social media. Provocative is in quotes because it doesn’t take much for a woman who is simply existing to be denigrated based on her appearance. Another woman in the group and I made eye contact after his comment. This is not the first time someone has said something like this to me, but I am still surprised when it happens. I guess I shouldn’t be, but every time I think “…we’re still saying things like this? To women? About women?”

It’s an excellent piece and reminded me that (whether it is a question of presentation… or self-initiated claims to expertise… or offers of special savings for anyone one applying the one-time super secret code at their website) the only thing that matters is whether the writing has substance.

And finally, over the weekend we received the sad news of the passing of Peter Edwardson who wrote about beer as “The Pub Curmugeon” after a short illness. His last post included this characteristic passage, one that summarizes his approach to beer as well as his understanding of what made it a simple pleasure worth appreciating:

Alcohol content is a vital element in the flavour make-up of beer, adding body, warmth, richness and sweetness. Make anything more than a trivial tweak, and it will significantly change the character of the beer. It is one thing to specifically set out to brew a low-strength beer, but something entirely different to reduce the strength of an existing beer that was designed for a higher strength. You may not have thought much of Fosters even when it was 4%. But now it is 3.4%, a 15% strength reduction, it is not the same product and, I would suggest, an inferior one.

I checked my notes and see that in the last five years or so these weekly digests of the news in beer included well over forty references to “Mudgie”. The sad loss of a singular voice.

So a couple of serious notes to end the week. Hopefully happier news next time. It’s Christmas day the week after that on Thursday… whatever shall I do? As you consider that and send in recommendations, please also check out, Boak and Bailey on this and every Saturday and then sign up for their entertaining footnotes, too. Look out for Stan when he feels the urge (now that he’s “retired” from beery news posts) from Budapest or wherever – as he is getting active again. Then 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 has returned from his break since April so you can embrace the sweary Mary! 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.

*Update: as noted for the double!
**A variation is the trade writer who still believes sorta circa 2011 that everyone is one off-flavour seminar from connoisseurship, like Mr. B on LinkedIn this week: “…what you’re getting in up-front money or equipment ultimately pales beside the loss in credibility (especially for places which claim culinary, cocktail, or oenological expertise!), disappointed customers, and ultimately, lost sales. Taking placement fees for a percentage of your taps is one thing — although trust me, more than a few people are going to be able to spot them! — but turning over most or all of them speaks to laziness, desperation, or simple disinterest.” Why, then, do these places continue to operate as craft beer bars shut? Serving their customers’ demands? 
***Yet the math is right there – at 13p profit you would have to sell 500 pints an hour to clear £65. If that was your sole source of income. But then the article would be much shorter. Or is it that the ones at the bottom of the Bell curve no where near a 2.5% profit are the ones that close. Which is irrelevant to the analysis. But then, again, the article would be much shorter. 

The Over 50% Off Super Holiday Sales Saving Edition Of The Beery News Notes

You may need to turn your phone sideways to make this image fit. Or I could just center it. There. That’s better. For a long time, these weeks at the end of the year at the beer blog were a bit crazy. The Christmas photo contest (circa 2006-16) was on and I was sifting through a huge number of emails with multiple entries. Hundreds came in each Yuletide. Thinking back on that this week, I had a look through the 2010 submissions and found this lovely image sent in by Brian Stechschulte of San Francisco.  Here’s his birthday bio on Jay’s site. Another one of his enties won the contest that year. That image is of Rod Widmer among the quipment at the brewery. In what Brian described as Widmer’s cathedral. I like the glow. I’ll dip into the emails and old posts to see what else I can find to adorn these news notes throughout December.

Back to today’s news, first up the question of cash and how the UK budget reaction lead to something of a counter reaction. Sayeth Matty C.:

The worst thing about this week’s budget for me was seeing prominent figures in hospitality bemoaning the minimum wage increase because god forbid your staff should earn enough to actually afford, barely, the cost of living. For me it just demonstrates why all of this lobbying for a VAT cut isn’t so much about supporting a “dying” industry, put propping up profits for the people at the top. But no, it’s paying wages that’s the problem.

And their weekend footnotes to the weekend news, Boak and Bailey shared a similar sentiment:

Every budget goes the same: CAMRA and industry bodies lobby the Chancellor to do something to help pubs; the Chancellor does very little, if anything, to help pubs; CAMRA and industry bodies criticise the Chancellor’s failure to act and foretell doom for the hospitality industry. It’s been this way basically forever and yet, somehow, pubs continue to exist and beer continues to be manufactured and consumed.

As a person who takes home a tax based pay cheque, I have to be somewhat respectful of those lobbying for restraint.* But I am also aware that government can positively participate in economic growth and greater social good. So… and here’s the point for me… after years of ideological restraint hit by a global crisis or two there are times when the bite shared by all is for the longer term good.  As long as there is an identifiable long term good and it is shared by all.

Speaking of the burdens of the state, Drew Starr has shared thoughts on an excellent way of fighting back against authoritarianism – ban the lackies from your bar:

The kid who proudly called ICE on a carwash. Print this shit everywhere. Hell yeah, Sil! For those not from here: this is The Silhouette (nobody calls it that), one of Boston’s last remaining dive bars. For a college kid living in the area, it’s the last place you want to get banned from

We understand “The Sil” has barred a university student who called ICE on a car-wash and men in in balaclava abducted a group of nine workers. Perhaps more establishments might introduce a life-time ban.  Shaming down authoritarianism is a top drawer move.

How to cope? How to deal with the pressures of the day?  “Mulled beer!” sayeth Jessica M. seasonally through an interview with Sam Millard of Bevertown :

“The secret to making a great DIY mulled beer is in choosing the right base. The best results will come from a rich, malty profile or a sweet brown ale,” suggested Millard, who explained that “just like when mulling wine or cider, you need a base that is already really rich, full-flavoured and most importantly, not at all bitter. You ideally want something with a bit of body too, so ensure your beer is not too thin.” According to Millard: “While you may be tempted to use a super-hoppy IPA, keep in mind that its bitterness could overpower your chosen spices and throw everything off balance.

Now, keeping in mind that this is all a bit of an adver-informo piece, I still would recommend you try it. Jessica B herself was curious about this stuff a whole eighteen years ago. Me, I like to use Chimay Première, the red labeled dubbel, as the base. Tasty, strong and relatively cheap as dubbels go these days. And skip the idea of “DYI” and just go traditional with a Lambswool made with strong ale apples, sugar and ginger spice. Or, along with a lot of other options at this link, try to make Caudle if you are even more adventurous. If that is too complex, just go for try a pint of stout and port. It’s Christmas so you can just do that and even say you did.

Speaking of Yuletide, in the news from Newfoundland we read that more folks are going to get stoned for Christmas!

CEO Bruce Keating says net earnings rang in at $56.3M, a decrease of about $3.7M, mainly due to the removal of U.S products and decline in beer commissions.  Alcohol sales totalled $84.2M, down 1.5 percent however, cannabis sales are up 10.6 percent at $28.5M. Keating says those numbers could start to slow since that market is maturing. He says they’re optimistic that the Christmas season will boost sales numbers. 

Baby Jesus would no doubt approve. Speaking of which, Barry M has driven down to a depth I’ve never considered necessary over a controversy I had never heard of – are “cider” and “cyder” the same thing? Or categories of rerlated things? As a lifelong poor speller, I am gratified that the problem arises from puritans who insist every difference in spelling requires a difference in meaning:

Within English literature, early texts seem to use mostly ‘sider’, though it would appear that by the end of the 16th Century literature was generally split between ‘sider’ and ‘cider’. Both with an ‘i’. But there were exceptions of course, an dit has to be said, it was a bit like the Wild West when it came to spelling convention, with cyder, cider, sider, cidar, cicer and pommage featuring in texts of the time (thank you Elizabeth!). But let’s look at some of the cyders…

As we all know, standardization is the best friend of Satan or at least authoritarians. The minute hand, a tool for atronomers, was later added to the clock to steal time from Indistrial Age factory workers. The dictionary of Dr. Sammy J of 1755 helped create the idea of misspelling and therefore a resulting intellectual failure. And now we have this consequence, a finger pointy crisis in taxonomy which apparently turns on the factual regular but uncategorical past practice of adding water to cider now and then** which has led, hundreds of years later, to a backdating by someone deciding that the spelling must follow a practice. Sad. Distinctions can be without a difference. Let us rather embrace our negative capabilities.

Did you see what David J did? He just went and wrote the history of Wychwood for Pellicle:

“BrewDog is a modern interpretation of Hobgoblin,” says James Coyle, who was sales director at its parent brewery, Wychwood. “[The Hobgoblin identity] was built on motorbikes, grunge, and tattoos—this was the escapism of the brand.” Established by Paddy Glenny as The Glenny Brewery Company in Witney, Oxfordshire in 1983, it was renamed the Wychwood Brewery in 1990. Somehow, this small brewery in rural Oxfordshire went from selling to a few freehouses to producing a beer so iconic that it shifted 100,000 barrels a year, changed pub culture, and eventually became a global brand in the Carlsberg portfolio. Thanks to breweries like BrewDog, today we’re used to shock marketing tactics from beer firms. Many of the people I spoke to while researching this article repeated James’ sentiment about Hobgoblin being akin to the often-controversial Scottish brewery, including the fact that its initial success was driven by word of mouth rather than a huge marketing budget.

Over twenty years ago, Wychwood was on the shelves on Ontario and I posted reviews of their Fiddler’s Elbow in 2004 and Duchy Original Pale Ale in 2006. I didn’t love the bad Baggins branding of Wychwood – though not as deeply as the stupid “you’re not worthy” stuff from Stone.  I am please to say, however, that now I added a bit of info which may have assisted David in one paragraph in there – but what a beast of research. And all for you.

Speaking less of you and more of me, I am 62. When I was a teen, I worked with older seniors. People 62 were rye drinking Dads of pals who were vets of the Second World War. They were still up on ladders to fix something on the roof. Some could dress a deer. Me? Fitter than I was at 52.*** So I found this New York Times piece a bit odd. Frankly, if I was 42 around now I’d worry much more about 52 than 62.

On the theme of worry, James Beeson in The Grocer wrote about the financial troubles facing the BKeystone / Breal, a UK consolidator of brewers:

Breal bought a slew of unloved brands and then engaged in a damaging race to the bottom. This was the inevitable conclusion and the only surprise is that it has taken this long. My thoughts are with the blameless employees that will be affected by their failure. 

Breality strikes!**** He followed it up with an investigation over the legal steps being taken and their denial that they are going bust. Jessica M in DB on the same story shares that they have:

… reached out to Keystone for an update on its situation and its prediction of plans and sales for each of its brewery assets as well as asked about the fate of its brewery workers at each of its currently-owned sites. The group has, however, remained silent aside from its statements on social media assuring Black Sheep beer fans that it is “still here”.

And there have been more twists to the news of the suddenly “not here no more” Rogue including this from Doug Veliky:

It also surprised key partners including US Beverage (USB), with whom Rogue had just signed a national sales partnership, and who learned through the news and social media just like the rest of us. As part of their agreement announced on August 1, 2025 to represent the brand in the trade, members of Rogue’s national sales team transitioned their employment to the new partner company in an effort to ensure continuity and relationships. Now, without warning, USB is left with employees who were crucial to the partnership’s formation, but without a brand to sell or an understanding of its future.

Lordy. That’s not good. Clearly on August 1, 2025 the writing was on the wall in the offices of Rogue. Probably on dry erase boards all over their office walls. Did that continuity also include those employees’ accrued termination benefits rights?

Time for notes:

Note #1: “Hoolie” is a word. My late Dad was very entertained by the news that my new boss 28 years ago was so named.

Note #2: “Drunk Racoon in the Hardware Store!” I know this item is just for Stan… as he sent me the link… as if I didn’t already have the link to the story ready… just for Stan.*****

Definitely not on the hoolie, A. Gladman shared thoughts on a private spot at his parents’ home, a place to have a beer on a summer day:

There’s a spot where I like to sit and have a quiet beer when I visit them in the summer. I try to manage it at least once during each trip. It’s on a balcony, or a raised deck I suppose you might call it, that overlooks their small back garden. Wooden steps run down into the garden from one corner, and at the back a door takes you into their kitchen dining room. I like to sit there in a white plastic chair with my back to the wall, and look out to the sea, just a hundred or so yards away. Pale in the distance, the Isle of Wight rises like a cloud bank on the horizon. The wind blows; it’s always windy. The noise of waves breaking on the shingle echoes all around. Gulls and far-off wind chimes punctuate its ceaseless murmur. Somewhere nearby a rope slaps against a metal pole. 

More into this moment, Tyler Maas in the Milwaukee Record shared thoughts on his own sort of idyllic prospect, one that popped into his mind after the first major snowfall of the season:

Days like last Saturday are the closest thing we get to a “Snow Day” as adults. Any plans you made before weather became a factor are probably no more. The idea of driving anywhere seems unwise and borderline dangerous. Once you shovel the snow that’s already accumulated, all that’s left to do is wait to do it again when the flurries are through. So why not embrace the situation, put on some boots, and trudge to the nearest bar?… With driving and other aspects of everyday life temporarily removed from the equation, why not stay a while? You’ll surely burn off the calories from that extra round (or two) on the stroll home. Not to mention the energy you’ll expend during the second/third round of shoveling and when you inevitably dust off your car as the responsibilities of “real life” eventually come back into view.

Nice. Now, finally and with the greatest respect, I have to say that I can’t agree with the position taken by Laura H in The Telegraph last week on the issue of lowering the drink driving standards in England:

A recent survey has found that 58% of adult consider driving after drinking, even if the driver is within legal limits, to be “socially unacceptable.” This has inevitably emboldened the anti-alcohol lobby: already police chiefs and the British Medical Association have called for the rules to be made harsher – their proposals would push drivers who have a single pint over the limit. This is framed as a question of public safety, but in reality it’s yet another example of overzealous campaigners blaming all of society’s ills on the demon drink, without giving cause or justification.

I suppose my first issue is the language. Not sure the embolding was inevitable given those bold beings described have already been on their mission for years and years, according to the anti-anti-alcohol lobby. And not sure the campaigners are necessarily more than zealous. Can one be?****** But the real issue is without justification. This is particularly the case as the first observation is a justification: a majority of Britons are against the current scheme. So, too, the second observation: the police and doctors want stricter rules. We can disagree on the quality of these justifications but that’s what they are.  It’s also worth noting that context poses an obvious issue too. England, Wales and NI have the highest permitted levels of alcohol in all of what was once known as Europe. By over 50%. Check it out. It’s simply a fact that the criminalization of drinking and driving is a reasonable response to the harm it causes. As a lawyer, thirty years ago I spoke to an appeal of a driver who blew 0.082 so these things can be close. But the bottom line is no one is being forced to stop you from drinking. Just stop driving. Maybe try walking. Or get a cab. Or a bus. Or a bike. Or a designated driver. Or another place to drink.

And with that, I am done. It is Yule and I am off to maybe have a beer or maybe shovel or just fret about being late in getting the lights up and having note bought the pressies and what about the tree and … well… as I do that please also check out, Boak and Bailey on this and every Saturday and then sign up for their entertaining footnotes, too. Look out for Stan when he feels the urge (now that he’s “retired” from beery news posts) from Budapest or wherever – as he is getting active again. Then 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 has returned from his break since April so you can embrace the sweary Mary! 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. That’s quite good and after a break they may well be are back every month!

*But also as one who has a list of gains and savings for more than two decades that I have influenced to the point that I am effectively appellata free resource…
**But bring back the word “ciderkin” by the way.
***I have just passed the fourth anniversary of slowly getting back from a point which same me using a cane after badly wrenching a knee weeding a zucchini patch. Why? Life stressors resolved, sure. Daily small steps like stretching and exercises, yes. But most of all daily recording the data related to more and more of what I do: intermittent fasting goals (+/-17 hours a day); hours and quality slept (one mid-week sucky sleep does not make for a medical issue); drinks intake (down to 1.27 per day ave) and to do list daily chores achieved (done… next?). But by the way that whole life expectancy shift stuff has little to do with aging and much more to do with infant mortality. So relying on that to discuss the difference between retiring at 60, 65 or 70 means zippo.
****Sorry…
*****Stan also advised he will be reading these new notes from a train between Amsterdam and Budapest so everyone wave in that direction, please.
******Do Zealots look over at the overzealous and think “Jim’s over doing it a wee bit tonight… giving zeal a bad name…”

A Most Thoroughly August Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

What can you say about August that we each haven’t thought in our hearts of hearts? We are now well into the downside of the year, four months and three weeks and a bit until Christmas. It’s always struck me as odd that the first half of the year has seven months while the second only has five. August. Hmm. Plus it all gets a bit endtimesy around now. The garden gets weedy and a bit tired in the corners. We even got forest fire smoke from Pennsylvania this week, for God’s sake! Looks!! Good thing there’s all those fit folk at the Olympics in Paris, over there throwing themselves against the track, against the ball, against ocean waves and against each others fists to give us all at home cheering on the sofa an endorphin boost. Speaking of the Olympics, how’s the beer?

Anyone who was planning on heading over to Paris for the 2024 Olympics and expected to be having a boozy jaunt in a stadium is going to be sorely disappointed. Almost everyone who has got tickets to see bits of the 2024 Olympics will not be allowed to buy alcohol at the venues where the sporting competitions are taking place… if you must drink beer inside the venues then you’ll have to stick with the non-alcoholic stuff. For half a litre of non-alcoholic beer you’ll need to be spending €8 (£6.74), while if you want a 400ml drink of zero alcohol beer with some lemon juice in it that’ll cost €6 (£5.05).

Whhhaaaaat?!?!? Really? I’d be tempted to get me a robot but I suppose that makes sense in the keeping the eye on the ball sense for spectators but, more importantly, what is the point of cutting NA beer with juice? Don’t worry, however, as the rich in catered VIP zones will be able to drink… because… France… or the Olympics… or…

Same as it ever was? Things go around and around. Consider this piece from Jessica Mason in TDB on salting your beer:

According to the reports via Parade, the trendsetters claimed that “adding a bit of salt to your inexpensive brew will enhance the flavour” and described how “some people add salt to certain beers, like sours or IPAs, to enhance the fruity notes and reduce the bitterness” and suggested that “for those ‘cheaper’ beers, it’s supposed to make the brew taste a bit more highbrow”. The report emphasised how “Texans take beer salt so seriously” and said that drinkers were “likely to find lots of flavoured beer salt options when you want to crack open a cold one”.

Taverns when I was a lad in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 1980s had shakers of salt on the tables. It was an old guy thing even back then, used by the hard cases in the back corners, but soon a little rattle of the shaker was a habit at the Seahorse or the Lower Deck when the unpasturized generic draft was a little off. Definitely done at the Midtown.

More information has been released on experimentation with the hotest new brewing grain in town, fonio. Interesting news even if this was a rather silly statement from Carlsberg director of brewing science and technology Zoran Gojkovic apparently (but I hope incorrectly) recalling a past discussion with Garrett Oliver:

“The internet says it is millet, but there are lots of millet grains and this one comes from Africa. But, back then, I misunderstood was what it really was all about. If someone tells you something is beef, but really it is like a variety, like wagyu steak, then it can be more easily understood. What I didn’t know was that fonio, compared to other kinds of millet, is like the wagyu steak of grains. Millet, as a cereal could be quite boring, but this in its pure formula is not boring. It is elegant.”

I’m more comfortable with it being the warp drive of millets – but only because that is obviously even more silly. Or is it the warp drives of wagyu? Or the wagyu of warp? That’s the fonio beer name I want to see: Wagyu of Warp!

And, speaking of silly, we have yet another study that resulted from the study of studies that studied booze and, again, it has been determined that there has been a lack of studiouness about that J-Curve fibbery:

…a new analysis challenges the thinking and blames the rosy message on flawed research that compares drinkers with people who are sick and sober. Scientists in Canada delved into 107 published studies on people’s drinking habits and how long they lived. In most cases, they found that drinkers were compared with people who abstained or consumed very little alcohol, without taking into account that some had cut down or quit through ill health. The finding means that amid the abstainers and occasional drinkers are a significant number of sick people, bringing the group’s average health down, and making light to moderate drinkers look better off in comparison.

I mentioned how dodgy the concept was at least as far back in 2018 but this newer focus on the problem of including “people who had stopped or cut down their drinking for health reasons in the comparison group” is critical. Note: not drinking because you are sick is different that being sick due to not drinking.

Note too: “golloping beer with zest” was a thing. Gary explains.

In Pellicle, David Jesuason wrote about one of the the tougher aspects, the mental health implications, that can go along with setting out to run a small brewery. This is how he set the scene at McColl’s Brewery of Evenwood, County Durham before help arrived:

“I came here thinking all I have to do is 150 casks a week and it didn’t happen,” Danny says. “Because I did it [before] I thought I was capable of doing it and not even knowing it was the wrong [thing to do] as well.” Danny’s mental health suffered because there was no long-term strategy, just day-to-day drudgery. Graft instead of focus. “I couldn’t make good decisions,” he tells me. He was running the entire operation by himself: brewing, selling and even delivering the beer to customers. It was far too much to take on, his mental health suffered and Gemma, his wife, became worried about him having suffered from depression herself.

That piece reminded me of the life of a farmer, alone with their business subject to the whims of nature and the trade. Should brewing trade associations provide mental health support programs similar to those being set up for agriculture?

Also on the ag beat, Stan has given us something to chew on with his July 2024 edition of Hop Queries, Vol. 8, No. 3 for those who are trying to collect a full set. He mentions that harvest time has begun, triggering images of golden light on hedgerow graced horse plowed scenes, perhaps mixing with Beethoven’s 6th wafting quietly in from somewhere… then – WHAMMO – the invasion of the lab-coated eggheads begins:

Scientists at Sapporo in Japan used headband sensors to measure the brainwaves of participants… The subjects reported feeling relaxed by the aromas of linalool and geraniol because they provided floral and green impressions… An increasing tendency in the rhythm regularities of the frequency fluctuations of the right frontal alpha-waves while drinking a European pilsner-type beer with aromas characterized by hops. 

HEADBAND SENSORS!!! And, for the double, Stan pointed to this number crunching post from Phil Cook on Monday but (even though I may risk breaking an unwritten weekly updating rule) I want to unpack this point in more detail – one key difference between Australian and other beer judging events:

Because there’s a list of every beer entered, not just those that win medals, we can calculate some ‘batting averages’ to better compare how each brewery fared. So, I’ve worked out each entrant’s medal percentage (MPC: how many of their beers won a medal, of any kind) and their points per entry (PPE: adding 3 for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze, then dividing by number of entries submitted). Bigger numbers are better in both cases; overall about 74% of beers entered earned a medal,2 and if your PPE was 1.00 or higher your brewery was in the top half of the competition. 

This would be a huge step towards making the results of these events more meaningful that those of the moveable buffet of the international circle of they who judge. Being able to figure out brewery top rankings as well as those surprising disappointments would be a great benefit to consumers. But who in beer puts the buyer first?

Perhaps connected, Jeff shared his thoughts on the financial perils of being a freelancer writing about the brewing trade without separate income:

Writing is a terrible way to make a living. It’s why people end up going into marketing. You could spend your days scrambling after $600 articles, or you could get a job for $60k with benefits. This is why we bleed great writers, who take their services to companies who will pay what their work is worth. It’s not just that the money’s bad—it’s also hard to get. If you could somehow stack up your articles and get a couple in every week, you could make a decent living, maybe fifty, sixty grand a year before taxes… Trying to pitch stories, and then research, report, and write a hundred of them in a year? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but again, you’d be barely making more than working at McDonald’s if you somehow enjoyed that level of “success,” which perhaps 2-3% of working freelancers enjoy.

The best line was near the end: “If you have any other choice, don’t write.” What he means (of course… or rather I hope!) is don’t write for money but this isn’t news.* Still… write. Writing a free, joyful and easy experience of expression. Scribble, jot, draft, forget and rediscover – and, yes, even submit. Just don’t think you’re going to be buying the kiddies shoes with the income.

Joyful, too, is Dave “Still No Relation” Bailey’s cartooning, also in Pellicle, which this month explored the notion of perfection.  And if you want an example of writing for joy, ATJ has been working on one particular theme quite a bit over at his Substack, that being ATJ sitting in a pub and looking at the details of the scene around him. Second or third time I read one of his I thought “hmm…now, that sounds familiar” BUT as this week’s edition testifies its his process being worked out before our eyes:

My eye was caught by a faded photo of the pub, sometime before World War I. Outside it, there stood a line of long dead regulars, mainly men, standing still, a couple smiling, the rest sombre and holding themselves stiffly as if on parade, which several years later many of them would be, ready to march off to war. A long ago day, the sun shining maybe, though given the quality of the photo it was hard to say. Bowler hats, cloth caps, none of them bareheaded for that was not how they presented themselves to the world then. I’d like to think that once the photographer finished, off the men went into the pub, glasses of ale and cider purchased and amid the hubbub there would have been little time for reflection.

Sharp stuff. And it sure beats the sort of cash-focused writing that has recently given us such gems as “deepest echelons of the industry” and “with demand being high, the category has continued to thrive, despite the sector struggling” and the astoundingly poorly thought out alleged expression of expertise “Liquids within the same ‘competitive set’ are not distinctive from one another as liquids.” Bring on the robots of A.I.! Viva Robots!!

No, I didn’t mean that. There are no robots of joy. It’s actually all around us already now if you look for joy. We see it in a long wandering piece about wandering at length. And we also see it at home as when Rachel Hendry in her emailed newsletter J’Adore Le Plonk shared some thoughts on the role and value of the leftover bottle of wine there in the kitchen that was opened a few days ago… and may have lost whatever finesse it had:

Service work should neither be seen nor paid, tends to be the general consensus and when my wine joins me in a position of domestic work I attach the same framework to it. Why add this beautiful, evocative glass of wine to my dish when I can reach for something leftover, or looked down on, fuck it, why not just add water instead? The recipe provides a role for a wine that is past its best, that may otherwise be retired down the drain and into the bin. It doesn’t, however, mean the wine isn’t important. Wine has many roles in our lives and contributor in the kitchen can be one of them. As I work through my hesitation and add a splash of my wine to the courgettes slowly melting into butter I notice I have not lost anything in the process. The wine is still mine to enjoy, I have placed value on an ingredient as I would like to be valued myself and the meal tastes better for it.

And I should have mentioned that Katie wrote a few weeks ago about trying Italian wines with any sorts of unexpected flavours to see what works for you. My tip? Chianti with roast turkey. It can have a swell cranberry vibe going on. Try a turkey and blue cheese sandwich with slices of pear and a cold glass of Chianti. Could sound weird but it works. Not this weird, mind you, but there that gets a lot going on.

That is it. Enough! Here are the credits, the stats the recommends and the footnotes and the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections.**** Want to keep up with the news before next Thursday? Check out Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan back each Monday… with a top drawer effort this week. Elsewhere go look at then listen to Lew’s podcast. And get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now revitalised and wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog in this weeks best medium as message news. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the BOAS podcast for the bro-ly. And the long standing Beervana podcast …except they have now stood down.  Plus We Are Beer People. The Boys Are From Märzen podcast appears suspended as does BeerEdge, too. But not Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a few podcasts… but some may be losing steam… until… Lew’s interview! And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube.  The Moon Under Water… is gone which is not surprising as the ask was $10 a month. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that but is writing for 47 readers over there. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link! Errr… nope, it is gone again.

*My full sympathies (though I might have used the phrase “good writers” to convey a sense of realism.) I wrote this in an email to Max, now eleven years ago: “It is tough. There is no money in beer writing so if that is all you have to go on… I have met with pro writers over beer and always find them bagged out and drained from the nights of PR work in pubs to keep the wolf from the door. I complained once somewhere about how craft brewers should be supporting good beer writers directly without expectation of return and this was met with howls – even from writers. Earn your way as a freelancer, said the freelancers. Suck it up and take the junkets, said those on the junkets.” Is that the macho forehead + wall thinking part of the freelancing problem?
**This week’s update on my own emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (132) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (930) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,483) hovering somewhere well above my largely ignored Instagram (160), crap Threads (52) with Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear.

The Hardly Able To Sleep I’m So Excited Dontcha Know Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

It is getting close, isn’t it. Hopefully when this is posted, all the mail and all the parcels will have been sent. I have a list and on that list it says that will be done… so it will… right? Last week I shared a photo from the Xmas contests of a decade or so ago and, Lordy, the image above submitted by Jeff of Beervana back in 2012 passed by my Facebook memories on the weekend. Another great entry worth resharing – if only to ponder the question of whether the man on the little green vehicle spent his days saying “wheeee…. oh yeah… vrooooommmm!” quietly to himself.

Starting locally, sometime today we may learn more about the government of Ontario’s new plans for the booze marketplace. The CBC has posted some juicy rumours with perhaps a few twists on expectations:

… two sources said the government will require retailers to devote some portion of their shelf space to Ontario’s craft brewers and small-scale wineries, but had no specifics. The reforms will not alter the role or structure of the LCBO in the retail landscape, sources said. Some industry sources said The Beer Store will be well-placed to corner the potentially lucrative market for distributing beer to thousands of new locations in supermarkets, convenience store and gas stations because of the breadth of its existing distribution network.

Let’s be clear. I look forward to 2025, the year when any grocery stores, all corner stores and any gas stations which are willing will be able to step up and start selling those beers, wines, ciders and even that stuff we call “coolers” but marketeers refer to as “ready-to-drink alcoholic beverages, such as seltzers or premixed cocktails (collectively known as RTDs).” But I also fully expect this to be a mess like the cannabis marketplace of the last five years due largely to a retracting public interest with a lot of good intended investment dollars along with certain consumer hopes to go down the toilet, a lot of places just selling the marco gak and the concept of “craft” being further diluted… if that is even possible.

OK – festive question: does your drinks culture include insanely complex and repetitive Christmas parties? I’ve always thought the British over do these things and am not dissuaded from a guide like this to surviving them without compromise even with all the dangers – social, career or otherwise:

Even if you can hold your nog, there’s snogging — firmly back after the plague years — to consider. And then reconsider: 59 per cent of office romances end with a resignation. Beyond the work do, there’s double booking, guest lists and menu planning, dress codes and inquisitive v intrusive small talk to consider. Personally, I love a 4am finish, dissolve in the face of trying to deliver dinner to the table before 10pm, love flirting with strangers, hate awkward set-ups and loathe being asked to squeeze in for a photo.

Yikes. Too much. And troubles in big fests too? CAMRA has announced that the “Great British Beer Festival is taking a year off in 2024 but will return in 2025.” And Eoghan shared that:

…its Belgian equivalent Zythos also not going ahead in 2024. Zythos moved from Leuven to Kortrijk in 2023 but now cancelled next year, citing “organisational reasons” Will it ever come back?

If you need a drink, just get ye to a proper establishment. The Mudge has again noted the Merseyside Pub Guide from Phil Wieland which, as promised, “goes in the pubs where no other bloggers dare to venture“… like he did this week:

On my previous visits I have noted that this is a football fans’ pub and I recall many years ago during the Euros finding all the regulars with red white and blue face paint and silly hats.  Today was no exception, and the place was busy with noisy Liverpool fans, all very happy as their team was now winning.  No face paint this time! I watched the last few minutes of a rather scrappy game until the whistle went with 102 on the clock, welcomed with a very loud cheer.  More cheers when we learned that that LFC were now top of the league, albeit possibly for only two or three hours. The atmosphere gradually calmed down a little but it remained a lively pub, another proper boozer.

And Jessica herself of B+B has sent a dispatch from Sheffield, a trip that has become an annual affair, where she met up with Retired Martin himself:

First, Ray was unfortunately unwell, so this ended up being a solo trip for me. Secondly, it turns out I can’t come to Sheffield two years in a row and ignore The Rutland Arms, even if that does break the new-pubs-only rule. Martin has handily written up the first part of my weekend. (Yes, I am the mysterious “guest from Bristol”.) He suggested a few meeting spots and I went for The Old Shoe, on the grounds that it was central and promised a good range of beer. It’s always interesting to see how a newly-opened pub can compete in a well-established drinking culture. I’d say based on a short visit that this is a great addition to the city centre.

And… and , for the immediate double, the brawny brains of B+B posed an excellent question that is not unrelated:

Are the pubs dead because there’s a Wetherspoon nearby? Or is the Wetherspoon busy because the pubs nearby are dead?

Check out the comments, too: “My purely anecdotal observation on the two huge Wetherspoons in central Dublin is that they attract a crowd that wouldn’t be in proper pubs otherwise….” There’s sort of a proper theme, then, this week: considering the current sense of the relative rough and tumble of competition and the resulting success of pubs as opposed to fretting about their openings, closings and, you know, intentional burnings down. What makes them work? Does getting yourself known as a fan base hangout really work?

Has a second and perhaps more unexpected theme arise this week? What to make of how very weird it would be if US craft beer took warmly to supplying murderous dictatorships as a way in part to keep their heads above water – but that’s what we learned might be affot this week from Dave Infante in VinePair:

Parr is emphatic that he doesn’t want craft breweries to sell their beer in China, or anywhere else, unless it makes good business sense. “Brewers need to consider whether they have the capacity, the product range, the pricing, and the resources to support all those things like regulatory compliance, marketing, a trade relationship when that could otherwise be supporting your domestic market,” he says. But the potential upside is considerable. “China is certainly a huge market … [and] despite the economic challenges, there’s a segment of the population that has the money to pay for premium products.”

I hear officers’ mess halls in the the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China might have an interest in warm overly hopped IPAs and exploding fruity kettles sours. Would you take that money? But…  seriously? Has craft gotten so stunned, so needy that it hugs the despot and rejects the lessons of  New Belgium and Kirin dabbling into the fridges of the approved classes of Myanmar? And along a lighter, tempered version of something similar, we may have already have a winner for top junket of 2024 as Jeff explained:

I’ve been invited to give the keynote speech at this year’s Central European Brewers Conference in Budapest. I’ve never visited this city routinely described as one of Europe’s most beautiful, so I’m psyched… I’m going to be speaking on a topic dear to my heart—how culture manifests—but the talk will have a special focus on why that’s relevant to individual breweries… It is a smaller event, which means you’ll have real access to the folks on the ground, including luminaries like Evan Rail, who is the conference MC; see the list of speakers at the links above…

No doubt Hungarians of the current politico-cultural bent with be keen on any illustrations of cultural nationalism made manifest. Try the Tokaji but perhaps best not to mention the related regional imperial tensions. Premium drinks for autocrats.

These things on the edges speak to these times, I am sure. And somewhat relatedly I am left wondering if this is something of a buried lede – but it might be better to arrange the data before the thread begins. Not quite sure of the point other than perhaps the perpetual craft grope 4 hope demographic thing. So… will they or won’t they?

We’ve known for years that underage drinking has been dropping. Monitoring the Future data shows the % of 12th graders drinking has been dropping for years. So it’s no surprise that 16-22 year old Gen Zers would drink less than Millennials.

By comparison, a nice bit of work in Pellicle this week by Courtney Iseman on the cask ale scene in New York City. NYC has been a beer town for over 400 years and it was nice to see a proper bit of research into the recent history of cask there:

Having also tracked bars with cask beer for his blog Gotham Imbiber, Alex confirms there were 67 New York bars serving cask pre-Covid. The pandemic certainly acted as a nail in the coffin for cask beer, moving imbibing into the home. But in New York City, it’s safe to say that while plenty of bars had carried on with perhaps intermittent cask programs, the fervour had cooled. The beer scene had moved into brewery taprooms, suddenly allowed to exist after New York governor Andrew Cuomo signed The Craft NY Act into effect in 2014.

Before the Gotham Imbiber was a blog it was a ‘zine (as this 2007 BeerAdvocate article describes) that identified where cask could be found throughout the city. So I am not sure that the statute was as critical as other factors like higher commercial rents or simply the entertainment competition in the Big Apple. Cask ale and taprooms also predate that date but they were more to be found upstate in Albany, Syracuse and Buffalo like the taproom in 2006 at Middle Ages or at the dearly departed Clarks the year before. Today’s story shares how the arc of history in this century shows how NYC lagged in matters of good beer behind even the rest of the state, leading us to where we are today.

And Gary has been posting another series on a single topic, this time ads from 1924-25 promoting the somewhat vague Barclay’s Lager advertising slogan “Still Discussing It!” which turns out to be a bit of a then new and modern conversation:

…the theme continues of Mrs. Brown showing an equal if not greater interest than her husband in Barclay’s beer. Not all the ads stress the wife’s independence. In one, while sharing (always) the husband’s taste in beer an alterior motive appears, to butter him up for a post-meal shopping spree. In another, impressed by the panoply of financiers in the chic restaurant, she muses she might accompany one to Throgmorton Street (home of the Stock Market) to make an investment sure to pay off, a flutter she calls it.

The characters here are more affluent and carefree but still the structure of the campaign remind me of the ads from two decades later during the war sent out by Labatt under the “Isn’t It The Truth” slogan where the main voices are women working towards their own liberation along with freedom from military dictatorship… hmm… there’s that word again…

Back to Yuletide merriment, Will Hawkes in his December edition of London Beer City newsletter for December set out to find out if the touristy Kensington landmark The Churchill Arms truly is really London’s most Christmassy pub by comparing it to “The Dog and Bell (‘Dog’, locally) in Deptford”:

The best seat in the house – inside the door on the left, dark-green banquettes and a great view of the bar – is untaken. It’s not as busy as at The Churchill, and the voices are all English or Irish, but it shares that key quality: a sense of carefree happiness, of reality postponed.  Across the way is a family – grandparents, daughter and two kids (“Tell grandad what colour the loos are … Millwall blue aren’t they?”) – while the regulars are seated at the bar in the new bit of the pub, chiselled out of the next-door building a few years back. There are hops above the bar, alongside copious Christmas decorations – sliced oranges, pine cones, pine leaves – hanging thick and lustrous from the walls and ceilings. 

Nice… and finally, maybe not so nice but still one of the funnier yet still sadder tweets was posted by Jessica Mason this week, one that bears preserving should Twex get what it deserves:

EXCLUSIVE: I’m approaching the final week of work for 2023. Glorious men of Twitter, you have JUST ONE WEEK LEFT to tell me how to do my job. Knock yourselves out. #micropenisdetectedonaisle3

As regular readers may have picked up, I have a lot of time for Jessica Mason’s writing about beer business as well as the surrounding culture and so I read this mindful of how it reflects not only (1) the sick abuse she bears personally or even (2) a broader comment on the pervasive misogynistic shit that women in beer have to put up with but, let’s be honest, (3) also a reflection on how good beer culture has a fair share of pricky pathetic fifth-rate obstructive domineers (and, yes, perhaps even -atrixes) who actually bring little to the table but still screw things up for others by blocking the way for others who are more interesting and deserving. Suffice it to say, after all these years now, I am not thrilled with the effectiveness of the curre “state of social advocacy work in craft beer.”

There. Next week, the Yuletide roundup. And remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (97) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (909) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,426) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (164), with unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. All in all I now have a bit of dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat and accept that BlueSky is catching up in “the race to replace.” Even so and although it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing or perhaps only waiting to discuss beer:

Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Stan Hieronymus | The Man!
Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Curmudgeon Ale Works | Jonathon is Brewing
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
BeoirFest | They say “Let’s Talk Beer”
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
The Bar Towel | Toronto’s chat zone for beer lovers
Chicago Beer Society | Folk in Chicago getting social over beer
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Roy of Quare Swally | Beery ramblings from Northern Ireland
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms
Jacob Berg | Beer talking librarian

Still too, maybe check the blogs, newsletters and even podcasts (really? barely! This era’s 8-track tapes!) to stay on top of things including the proud and public and certainly more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays when he is not SLACKING OFF! Look at me – I forgot to link to Lew’s podcast. Fixed. Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by this year’s model citizen David Jesudason on the odd Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now much less occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back with all the sweary Mary he can think of! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. That’s quite good. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too.  All About Beer has introduced a podcast… but also seems to be losing steam. And there’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube and remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frankly, I think he just makes this stuff up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stan Hieronymus | The Man!
Boak & Bailey | The B² experience
Curmudgeon Ale Works | Jonathon is Brewing
Katie Mather | Shiny Biscuit and Corto
David Jesudason | “Desi Pubs” (2023) author
BeoirFest | They say “Let’s Talk Beer”
Ron Pattinson | The RonAlongAThon Himself
Al Reece AKA Velky Al | Fuggled
Jennifer Jordan | US hops historian
Alan McLeod | A Good Beer Blog (… me…)
Andreas Krennmair | Vienna beer and lager historian
Beer Ladies Podcast | Lisa Grimm and colleagues
The Bar Towel | Toronto’s chat zone for beer lovers
Chicago Beer Society | Folk in Chicago getting social over beer
Jay Brooks | Brookston Beer Bulletin
Joe Stange | Belgian beer expert, beer magazine editor
Cider Bar | Barry makes Kertelreiter cider
Laura Hadland | CAMRA historian and beer writer
Brian Alberts | US beer historian
Jon Abernathy | The Beer Site
Maureen Ogle | US Beer Historian
Lars Garshol | Norwegian Beer Historian and Kveik Hunter
James Beeson | Beeson on Beer
Carla Jean | MAINER!!!
Thandi Guilherme | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Lisa Grimm | Beer Ladies Podcast Co-host
Roy of Quare Swally | Beery ramblings from Northern Ireland
Rob Talksbeer | Podcaster and Youtuber
Anthony Gladman | UK Drinks Writer
Jeff Alworth | Manna Of Beervana
Northwest Beer Guide | Fairly self explanatory… but not NW Latvia…
Evan Rail | Prague based GBH editor, freelance writer, NYT etc.
Todd Alström | 50% of the Alströms
Jacob Berg | Beer talking librarian

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

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

 

Your Mid-May 2022 Thursday Beery News Notes

Chores. Garden chores. The pruned willow is just about casting enough shade for its six month tour of duty, leaning over me as I sit and sweat and drink a beer. And, about thirty feet away, I built a nice small patch of salad-y things this week radishes, red and green lettuce. Stuff getting done. That’s something, quite a something. For a place that had three frosts under two weeks ago. Then I remembered I have rabbits. Not mine. The wild bunnies of the neighbourhood. So… now I need to box in the patches with walls and a cage top. Perhaps a hinge top will be introduced. Not having chicken wire dig into your neck once the top slips as you gather in the harvest? That’s innovative. Innovation born of not thinking something through fully in the first place. That’s my style.

Beer news? Beer news! It’s a big week this week. First up, the Craft Brewers Conference 2022 ended up having a couple of note worthy twists this week: a fine beer got runner up to the runner up where the runners up don’t actually exist aaaaannnnnnnnd… it was a Covid-19 super spreader event. There’s not much you can say as not one saw it coming… except Robin:

So uh…everyone at cbc just not wearing masks huh…

Not hard at all, doing the right thing. And if that wasn’t enough, plenty of folk wrote have thoughts about the #1 third place for an American classic. Andres wrote the thread o’the week on process. We also got juries of beer fans standing up to snarkily defend the indefensible verdict… the “not credible“*… because “they’re all world class experts of course“… which I take to be a dig but it might not be a dig. AJT added a useful note:

Reminds me of the story that John Keeling tells about when he was at Fullers and judging in the US – their ESB was knocked out of the ESB category for being out of style…

In longer form, we had omni-directional finger wags from Jerard Fagerberg and… my pal Lew who may want to recognize the third possibility:

But as I say to people who complain about the Electoral College, if you don’t like the way the rules are, work to change them. If you’re a brewer who thinks that every medal in every category should always be awarded, because we’ve reached the point as an industry where common levels of excellence are understood and achieved – or, hell, just because – then get organized, find other brewers who feel the same way, and get the rules changed. Or don’t. But if you don’t agree with it, and you don’t do anything about it, you’re just going to be pissed when it happens again. Savvy? Now get out there and brew, or drink, and stop worrying about this. There are a lot more important things, even in beer.

GET OFF HIS LAWN!!! Note: Electoral College references are akin to Godwin’s Law. And that third possibility? For me, be like most people and realize these events are just low level oddly structured fun that are focused on brand promotion. No one loses an eye. Competitions are just a nice side-hobby in the beer world.

On a point much further along the parabolic niceness scale, Lily had her essay on a possibly perfect pub published in Pellicle this week, the story of the Salutation Inn of Ham, Gloucestershire which comes with a few extras:

The pub is welcoming and homely, with low ceilings, pew-like wooden benches, and a fireplace lending welcome warmth to the pub’s two front rooms in winter. The bar is lined with taps and hand pulls pouring beer and cider from across the South West—including the pub’s own brewery adjoining at the rear—as well as the trusty and ubiquitous Guinness… The walled garden which houses the pigs is dotted with apple and pear trees, and the odd damson. The pigs, raucous and rambunctious as we step through the door in the elderly wall, are fed on a mix of apples, cheese curds, and occasionally pellets. Once the private garden of the Berkeley estate manager (the castle’s estate covers 6,000 acres across the local area), it is shown on early 19th Century maps surrounded by orchard after orchard—a cider history now long gone. 

Traveling much farther, Jeff made a flash visit to Norway which I worried was was going to be a bit of a drive-by so it was comforting to see the both Lars and Knut gave it the thumbs up. Still… it was a bit of an American abroad with the experience being too much or too little like the USA:

… you might mistake it for a pub in Ohio. Lots of hazies and other IPAs, some barrel-aged stouts, assorted pales. They even have Guinness … Those styles drive the same kind of drinkers in the US, but the difference is that in America they are dwarfed by the number of “regular” craft drinkers… We go through different developmental stages, and the first one is imitation. Norway has yet to find what they like on their own terms. I expected farmhouse brewing and especially kveik to be quite visible, yet it’s not. In fact, when people at the beer fest asked me about my plans for Norway and I mentioned Voss, 80% of them had never heard of the farmhouse tradition there… On the other hand, I’ve been impressed with the beer in general.

Ah, that old assumption that a land matches one’s expectations. Man is indeed the measure of all things. I’ll still probably just stick with Knut’s or Lars’ take on their own homeland. Local knowledge. As Stonch wrote of Prague this very week:

Over the years I have benefitted enormously from the writing of Evan and also Max @Pivnifilosof. Evan also once helped me and my mate Dave get tram tickets when we were too drunk to put the coins in the machine

Elsewhere, the problem of payment came up in a discussion at Boak and Bailey’s over the weekend and I clued into something that had not crystalized within my brain bucket before. I was led to a thought only after I wrote this:

…inventive creative writing sure has taken a hit in the good beer world. Payment has never amounted to quality in my mind, often the opposite. Yet it’s becoming more and more the case that it’s either paid for writing that’s pleasant enough or bits and bob that never seem to get enough time to be properly fleshed out. I can’t say I’m ever comfortable, for example, with histories published and paid for by the word – but who even has the time to put in a proper effort as the amateur’s act of obsession? Retirees, that’s who. They seem to be holding up their end of the bargain.

I then thought “why did I write that?” I did so for two reasons. First, I am always reluctant to be disagreeable especially (honestly… not tugging at a dangling thread) with B+B and, second, I wondered whether it was even true.  But it is if you look at it this way. Writing for pay puts a meter on the writing. You will get X amount per word or a flat rate but the reality is that you really are putting yourself on a clock. Based on what you are worth per hour rather than whether the writing is any good. Leading to conserving resources, measuring time as well as money. And deadlines.

Screw that. When I was young and fancy free before a few years back, I had all the time in the world to swan about researching obscure stuff about brewing. Not so much given an uptick in very interesting but very demanding work related matters.  Hence Martyn and Martin and Gary and Ron and the Tand and any number of others of the golden handshake who are able to research and scribble with a bit more leisure. Interestingly, the abovementioned Lars has written honestly this week about the other side of the coin, my path not taken a decade and a half ago:

I worked hard to set up talks back in September and October and had one month of good income with from that, before covid stopped it all. So now I need to try to restart that, but without spending so much time on it that I miss my book deadline. I got a deal writing articles for Craft Beer & Brewing magazine, which has also helped. The long and the short of it, however, is that less than a year into this I’ve had to start dipping into my savings, and it’s not a great feeling. So while I will keep doing all of the above to produce some money it looks like it won’t be enough.

Lars then shared an interest in readership support. Go read and contribute if you can. I have written it before but it repeats saying: I have every sympathy for someone who has decided to write about beer. For all the money in beer there is very little money in writing about beer, however interesting the topic.

Which leads to a few things. Like the issues of scope creep and expertise extrapolation. Sure, multiple skilled interests are possible – Dave Sun Lee is but one example – but the good folk who are committed to writing for cash have to go out further upon the waters with nets and lines. They give us stories not about beer but about other alcoholic beverages – about boozy seltzers and things claiming to be non-alcoholic beer even though both are so often laced with fruity gaks that defeat any commonality with brewed malt and hops. Where does it lead other than the inevitable high priced craft NA still unflavoured seltzers?!? Tottering towards international economic collapse, that’s where!!! Consider this behind the The Chicago Trib’s paywall, summarized by author Josh Noel this way:

Goose Island is taking Bourbon County into the world of pricey NFTs ($499 each!).

We really need to know no more. Could you imaging chucking away your pay that way? Pet Rocks taught me enough about that sort of thing in elementary school coming up on 50 years ago… though it did allow me the opportunity to post “Sucker juice layered upon the sucker juice!” There. Dots connected. Thanks for walking this path with me. BTW: Josh Noel is just wrong this time:

After digging in, I can see the future where NFTs play a role connecting brands and customers. Especially in beer, where the bond can be strong.

More sensibly, Gary indexed his recent posts on colonial English pubs in India. Excellent.

Finally, what to think about GBH apparently crossing a line and pulling an article about a legal process?***  While it is entirely healthy to be dubious of craft breweries and their ways, a few grabs on social media about the article prior to its removal may help explain why a reasonable cease and desist letter was sent. Consider this:

“[BrewDog CEO/cofounder James] Watt may have tried to uncover this alleged plot by paying a former romantic partner nearly £100,000 ($125,000 USD) in Bitcoin to gather information on ex-BrewDog staff and others who have been critical of him.”

… and this:

“Documents and interviews suggest Watt paid her to help him uncover information about his critics” and “The woman says she did not defraud or harass Watt, and that she does not believe former BrewDog employees are plotting against him. Her lawyers say she will “robustly” defend herself against these allegations” and “Three women who had contact with Ziem say they did not believe her to be part of a plot to take down Watt, and say they suspected Watt was using Ziem to gather information on them.

Contempt of court. It happens. It basically means you are contemptuous of the judicial process. Usually it is raised when someone won’t respect a warrant demanding their attendance but it can also mean that you are not letting the court do its job of fact finding, that you are interfering with the process. You can see how speculation and allegation become restated as fact. I see it now as I did when I saw the story’s brief appearance:

Speculative review of partially obtained evidence to be framed under the unique system of Scots uncodified civil law! Amazing pluck. Plus “… Watt may have tried to uncover this alleged plot by paying…” and “…people he sees as his enemies…” Impugning skullduggery? Heavens!

I was more thinking that there would be a form of libel suit under Scottish civil law due to the assertions of fact exemplified above but The Beer Nut guided me to the other process, the contempt under English proceedings pursuant to a UK statute.  Statutory contempt seems to require consideration of whether there is a lack of good faith, if we have “fair and accurate report of legal proceedings held in public” and whether “the risk of impediment or prejudice to particular legal proceedings is merely incidental”… all of which only a judge would determine. Only an actual judge. Lessons hopefully learned.

There. So serious this week. For more, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan every Monday except last Monday and next Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s irregular newsletter, The Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*To quote my favourite source, me: “And how can you have a mythical standard second place beer? It not only represents something not present but superior while also being inferior to another not present beer. Both of which (not being present) are not contemporaneously experienced, just somehow recalled.”
**Question: While we are at it… why do we rightly (example) qualify one beer publication as “Ferment, the promo magazine of a beer subscription service” when GBH is rarely mentioned as the promo magazine of a beer consultancy service? Both publish very interesting pieces and both aren’t really “reader supported” but actually subsidized by the non-publication side of the business for, logic dictates, non-publication side of the business reasons?
***And not even related to this continuing weirdness.

The December Is Almost Here Edition Of The Beery News Notes

And… that was November. or it will be soon. From mowing the lawn to frozen ground in a mere 30 days. World Series to free agency. Stout sales go from “?” to “!” It’s good like that, November. Knows it’s place. The saddest month. Not cold enough to be bracing and clear like January. Look, I’ve already started to move on. Christmas pressies have been bought. Just have to see if they arrive before January. What else might arrive by then? A Christmas photo contest entry pro photographer Peter B. Collins in 2011 might give you some idea.

Now then… first up, a nice bit of work from Retired Martin this week, a photo essay on Whitelock’s in Leeds interspersed with witty tidbits:

All tables taken, but obviously I’d brought the fine weather with me oop north and you don’t get much better outside seating than this, watching life amble by and end up in the loos for the Turks Head, wondering where you are.

Note: I am pro-deposit for reservations.

Not to overload you with pub observations, Life After Football shared some thoughts on one funny gaffer in “Pickled in Branston“:

The Gaffer had a glint in his eye and when I said, “Can I have a pint of Bass?” He replied with “No you can’t – it’s all mine!” Clearly, a man after my own heart and with four other people in there at about 12.05 he has a base of local punters happy to roll in on a Monday. “I’ll get you that pint young man,” he said and when I said I’d not been called that very often, quick as a flash he replied “I’ve been known to lie!”

Har-har… har… And Boak and Bailey asked a couple of good questions this week, one in their newsletter but first, in a variation on the theme, this about memories of past pubs perfect:

We’ve been struck down by nostalgia lately and find ourselves yearning for a particular experience of the pub. Maybe it’s birthdays. Maybe it’s the emotional impact of the two weirdest years we’ve ever lived through. Or perhaps it was just that excellent pint of Young’s Special at The Railway in Fishponds in Bristol.

They were again a bit nostalgic in the monthly newsletter, this time for beer blogging days.

…in the UK at least, the growth in professional (ish) outlets has sucked up a lot of content that would previously have been on blogs. That’s great news for writers – they get paid! They get proper photography and illustrations to accompany their piece! And it gets promoted properly, too. A few years ago, everyone was fretting about the death of beer media, meaning print magazines. But we wanted that and blogs, not one or the other, right?

Well, no. Print writing can be narrow and often by commission. My take? It may not be so much about the death of blogs as the ascent of a duller sort of paid writing. Don’t get me wrong. Some is great but commissioning editors with creditors set parameters.* People with just an interest have gotten to project themselves as people with authority without the decades of Stan‘s experience or the miles Jeff puts in. Others writers – sometimes the better ones – got jobs, moved on or just ran out of imaginative takes on a limited niche topic.  

Yes, that is where we are. It happens. And when things are slow like they have been in 2021, we tend to move backwards hoping we are staying in place.  This year of almost entirely updated next editions is almost over but not until we have, tah-da, the personalized beer flavour wheel. Beer flavour wheels have been around for decades. I am not sure why I need someone else’s different beer flavour wheel. Never bothered with one yet. But beer flavour wheels have been around for decades so someone must have. Schmelzle‘s dates from 2009. Dr. Morten Meilgaard seems to invented them in the 1970s. I asked a related question a decade ago and still have no idea what the answer is.

Speaking of flogging, this year’s version of the GIBC advertorial in the Chicago Tribune has led to some astounding information, not least of which is this:

The “reserve” package is the one the beer nerds want — 9 Bourbon County beers, including the most limited brands aged in the fancy barrels, for $259.99.

Bizarre. Takes some convincing folk that these prices (and I suppose the advice itself) aren’t suspect – if not grand larceny.

And speaking of the more than a bit weird, the US magazine Esquire published a short opinion piece that led to a long list of complaints:

The first half of a beer is why we drink beer. The second half is an afterthought at best, backwash at worst. If you were to watch all the beer commercials from the beginning of time, you’d hear the words cold and refreshing over and over and over. That’s because marketing people aren’t that creative, and also because that’s what sells beer. No one drinks beer for the tepid second half….

Comments included: (i) No one in their right mind would say this about another foodstuff. “Feel free to toss that second half of cold pizza in the garbage…”; (ii) “You know you can order smaller pours if you want beer to stay cold the whole time?”; and (iii) “Like she had to meet a word count quota before she left for Holiday break.” Esquire has apparently claimed that this is a stab at satire which, if it is true, suggests that it is not actual good satire.

PS: never heard of him either. But it appears the status you are desperately wanting to achieve is so incoherent that it requires outside intervention. And tricks.**

That’s a bit of negativity right there. For a bit right up there. What caused that? Nostalgia? Getting away from the pubs? We need to get grounded. Beth Demmon takes us to the hear and now with the first in a series on the state of the water supply in Southern California where the ground is dry and how the San Diego brewing scene may be facing change:

In such a water-thirsty region, it’s imperative for beverage companies like AleSmith to maximize their materials through sustainability initiatives. Cronin says AleSmith is on a two-year track to become Pure Water compliant through the city of San Diego, which aims to provide one-third of the city’s water supply locally by 2035 by purifying recycled water. Considering that Cronin estimates AleSmith rinses 7,000 – 10,000 gallons of wastewater into the municipal system every day, that’s millions of gallons available for reuse.

I brushed against this topic in 2015 in my superficial way but this is seven levels better. Excellent described detailed research. Additionally and also in the present and the positive, Jordan wrote about himself and what he is doing in beer these days – and this time it all makes utter sense:

I would guess that I probably try somewhere between 500-1000 beers every year, not counting repetition. Beyond a certain point, professionally speaking, beer is content. It’s informational. My fridge is more than half full of obligational beverages that people have sent for review and which might end up on instagram or in an article. I probably won’t finish more than about half of any of them, because the point isn’t drinking them; the point is knowing about them. Beer contains calories, as the new pair of jeans remind me.

Good advice. And look! More good advice. Three ingredient cocktails. Sensible simple tasty booze. That’s positive.

What next? History? History is good. Edd the BHB on 1910 Nottinghamshire ales, the Warwicks & Richardsons range. Did they still sing the song 120 years later? More history? Graham Dineley posed the question of beer stone and prehistoric pottery and found fatal flaws in the research to date:

Many scholarly academic beer “experts” have never actually made beer, and so have no experience or expertise. Brewing beer is a particularly experiential process, where the subtleties and nuances are necessary and essential for the full understanding. Many of these “experts” confuse beerstone with calcium oxalate. 

Finally but not happily, this tweet got my attention from Ren:

The irony of being written out of beer history by women hoping to change beer history…

Reality again. I do wish folk would get out of the way. I was also disheartened this week to see another part of Black experience filtered (again) by GBH through the inclusion of the hand of someone from outside. This is a bit of the opposite of my recent experience with the Beer Culture Summit 2021 produced by the Chicago Brewseum. Hand over the keyboard and get out of the way. No amount of time or miles can replace the unfiltered voice of one who has been there and has something to say.

That’s it. A tough one for good pics this week. A bit of a hard row to hoe if we are looking for the captivating in beer writing. Every week can’t be thrilling. I suppose, that’s the way it goes. Still, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Or is that dead now?) There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, The Gulp, too. (That’s a bit now and then now.) And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (which he may revive some day…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*Very tempted to go all Ogden Nash and spell it “paramitors.”!
**If your studies include flash cards and tricks… maybe you are not actually studying something at all.