Category: England

Your Fabulous “It’s A Whole New World!” Edition Of The Thursday Beery News Notes


Well, that was exciting and perhaps the beginning of a whole new era. The results are in and the happy winners will be taking their seats after Monday’s vote. Monday? Yes, of course. The municipal elections in Prince Edward Island were Monday… what you talking about? Oh, that. Sure. Fine. Well, yes it was fun. Halloween was fun, too. Got dressed up in orange and black and sat out on the front step. Just to be clear, that is a Mandavilla still alive outside with two months left to go in the year.  Viva global warming… for now. Like the new concrete pour? Two or three inches were added this fall to cap the stash. Viva that, too.

Turning to the real news, Ron has an interesting new feature, “Beers I Really Miss” and his post this week neatly captures a time in Prague:

I was lucky enough to visit Prague a few times in the mid-1980s. Before capitalism returned and fucked everything up. The pubs were wonderful. Multi-roomed and very atmospheric. There was only one negative feature: most only sold one draught beer. Every now and then, I’d come across a pub with Staropramen 10º and 12º on tap. But that was about it as far as multi-tap pubs went… Other than in brewpub U Fleku, draught Dark Lager was pretty rare in Prague. But there was one little place, in the Old Town close to Charles Bridge, that had Branik 12º Dark Lager on draught. What a great place to find by chance. Because that beer was wonderful. The classic Prague Dark Lager. Not too sweet, full and well-balanced. In short, a great drinking beer.  Inviting gulp after gulp, pint after pint. Then back came capitalism. All the Prague breweries were sold off as a job lot.

And racing forward to the now, Alistair had a good work trip to Denver recently, though it started out poorly:

 I was working at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, in Denver, where the organisation I work for was exhibiting. While I had attended the Sunday session of the Great American Beer Festival, I had given it up as not my kind of thing, decided to wander off, and find a brewery to sit in for a few hours on a beautiful sunny afternoon. Thus it was, after the saddest pint of cask brown ale I have ever had in my life, I found myself in an Uber on my way to the one brewery in Denver that I regretted not getting to on my last trip to the city, in 2022, Hogshead Brewery. 

What follows that ditching of whatever shadow is left of the GABF is pure reverie: “I reveled in the interplay of biscuity malt, with a touch of toffee, and lovely earthy, spicy, English hops…” He even uses the word “dreich”! Top points for anyone who pronounces it correctly.

Alistair was on a road trip. And I do enjoy following those we read who write about beer when they also write about their jobs and other interests. Contextualizes their skill sets and also allows for a familiar entry into new territories. For example is this neatly written comment by my old pal Jess about how thoughts in A.I. has shifted from the perspective of their work in finance:

If AI is the thing that gets people asking the question and investigating how they can finally use a computer to automate the bits of their work that ought to be then… hooray! I’ve been on a cycle with AI of initial excitement three years ago to deep disappointment, to anger at all the hype and am now coming round to “oh, that surprised me, that actually was quite good”. We are at the stage where someone who doesn’t have that great knowledge of Excel could ask Copilot or other tools for help and get a reasonable and fairly safe answer. 

That is heartening and a realistic view of where we are at. I am taking a mini course from my tiny undergrad college that’s run by one of my undergrad classmates and finally finding Google’s A.I. summaries of dark ages shifts in history helpful entry points.*  Anyway, if A.I. helps with structuring such understandings for B sudents like me at an initial stage of problem solving, maybe populating Mars with A.I. driven autonomous robots driving Telsas powered with solar panels as a counterweight to human existance won’t be so bad. Right? Right???

Speaking of brainy things, there was some good geolocating going on over at A London Inheritance in the photo and mapping essay on the demolition of the Lion Brewery on the South Bank of London in the years after WWII:

The tall buildings in the background to the left all remain to this day. The church is St. Johns at Waterloo, the building to the left of the tall office block is the old Royal Waterloo Hospital for Women and Children. I featured the following photo in my post on Sutton Walk. This was taken outside the pub with Sutton Walk running off to the right and part of the Lion Brewery directly opposite. I have repeated this photo as the following photo was taken from roughly the same position after the brewery buildings had been demolished. The bollards confirm the location. This is looking from point 2 on the 1940 map.

I love me some annotated mapping. Ron has discussed the importance of the Lion Brewery here and here. My main interest in the Lion is whether deep down in the foundations there would have been something left of the local Lambeth Ale that faded over 300 years ago I believe right around that spot. Maybe I am thinking of another bend in the river but that is one itch that won’t go away. Maybe I will ask A.I. because AL can’t figure it out.

Fermenting raspberries?!? Who can resist a story about fermenting raspberries? Not Pellicle which has pubslished this piece by Claire Bullen herself:

The raspberries are gurgling. All 600 kilograms of them, packed into the plastic fermenter that’s been sitting outside under a carport for the last two-and-a-half weeks. When the lid is sucked clean of its water seal, the fruit is revealed: a tight mass, faded pink and stippled with drupelets. It’s only when the cap is punched down with a shovel that they hiss and seethe. The raspberries are possessed by wild fermentation, carbonation racing through the bloody juice they’ve let. Their aroma billows promiscuously across the lawn, heady with carbon dioxide.

Reminds me that, care of global warming, I still have raspberries on the vine out back. Some getting a little tangy. I will be right back.

Speaking of the wonderful, David wrote about restaurants with touring sporting clientel for Vittles including Tharavadu, a Keralan restaurant in the Mill Hill area of Leeds and how it became a stop for some of the world’s great cricketers:

Samson’s guest was Virat Kohli, soon-to-be-captain of the Indian team. Mendonca quickly ushered them to a corner table so the other customers wouldn’t disturb them, although one member of staff was so nervous she could barely hold the tray without shaking. Kohli, then in his pre-vegetarian days, dined on chicken, fish and egg dishes, with a particular liking for the curries paired with appams and a side of masala dosa – an order Mendonca reels off without having to think. At the end of the meal, Kohli presented the restaurant with a signed bat. By Kohli’s next meal at Tharavadu, during the 2019 World Cup, it had become a must-visit restaurant for cricketing royalty, with guests like Ravi Shastri, Michael Holding and Mike Atherton.

Now I want dinner. Here’s some notes!

Note #1: Which came first? The Green Man or The Green Man?
Note #2: BuzzBall’s owners kill off legacy Oregon brewer Full Sale.
Note #3: The Wally Dug needs an upgrade.

Have you ever sent a trepedacous big toe stretching out into the waters to find out if we’ve finally close to hitting rock bottom? Well, there could be a connection to that question with what pleasure trade conglomerates Tilray and Sam Adams are up to in terms of their beer production? Are they any sort of bellwether for something or other? Let’s see. BMI says Tilray is:

…reshuffling: it’s aiming for ~$20 mil in annualized cost savings by end of fiscal ’28 (May 2028); since Jan 2025, Tilray reduced its US distributor network by “approximately 9%” while reducing its SKU count by about 28% over the same timeframe…

Motley Fool says US investors are missing big profits in Europe yet the stock is down a stunning 98% over five years and one drinks commentator is rationally pessimilistic.  The larger organization by a factor of about eight,  Boston Beer stocks sees its shares down 57% over five years. Also at BMI, we see that beer is not being considered either the main problem or a solution it seems:

…hard seltzer and craft beer [are] the softest spots in Boston Beer’s craft portfolio, Q3 earnings call showed. Truly remains the biggest drag, leading ceo Jim Koch and co to put “everything on the table” to figure out how to fix it. Message on craft wasn’t nearly as drastic, plugging away with various tweaks and additions.

Motley Fool has indicated some optimism for Bostom Beer too but “consumer demand continues to shift away from traditional beer.” So both firms coping, consolidating, rolling out more plans. But not sure how either is doing something to make folk to just want more of their beer. Relatedly perhaps, the head of AB, the NAm division of AB Inbev, just quit.

Never the quitter, over at Facebook Laura has undertaken a solid bit of critical thinking about certain limits some would impose on beer and politics in the UK:

The Morning Advertiser reports that the founder of ART Hospitality (no… me neither), Dorian Kirk, has called for Westminster City Council to investigate the circumstances around the Chancellor downing a pint in the Two Chairman on Wednesday after the Budget. He says that licensing conditions prohibit irresponsible promotions and encouraging customers to drink a quantity of alcohol within a certain time or in excess qualities.Talk about a cheap shot to grab headlines. There’s a lot that you can pick the Chancellor up on without such pointless gripes. I saw that the Chancellor had downed a pint and thought ‘so what?’ and moved on with my life. Obviously, this press stunt wasn’t a promotion organised by the pub. It was his choice, and probably his team’s idea.

We need more critical thinking like that.** In a same or similar situation, and as I have noted on many occassions, a Canadian politician must be seen with a beer if they have any hope of election. The idea that a pub should suffer for a candidate’s or elected official’s decision to drain a pint is nutso. But we are we and not necessarily ye. See Paul Theroux on Canada:***

Theroux’s father spoke French and his ancestors have lived in the village of Yamaska, north of Montreal, since the early 18th century. But temperamentally, Theroux feels American. “Politically, culturally, I was raised differently. I don’t feel aggrieved the way they do. I couldn’t make it through a Canadian winter.” The isolation would get to him. “They live in little bubbles. One of the great things about driving through the States is that every mile is different. Sometimes, in Canada, you’re a whole afternoon in the prairie and it’s unvarying.”

I really really wish he had said tiny bubbles instead… which would have, you know, captured the mood of a kitchen party in late January a bit better. Doncha know.

Checking in around the world, for The Baffler Peer Schouten reports on a corner of the planet we don’t hear from very much, the DRC:

There is a saying in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: “You can bomb a hospital, but not Bralima.” Short for Brasseries, Limonaderies et Malteries S.A., Bralima is the DRC’s oldest brewery and one of the largest beer producers in Central Africa, and, until recently, a subsidiary of the Dutch beer giant Heineken. Every day, countless bottles of Primus lager roll off Bralima production lines in major cities across the country, and by year’s end, they are converted into hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of revenue. Dozens of armed groups may roam the DRC countryside conquering mining sites, looting health clinics, and committing atrocities against civilians, but even to them Bralima is sacred.

It’s the story about the trekking of cases of beer taken overland to mining sites and distant village watering holes called ngand. For five days in from the road. By foot. Wow.

In health news, I was reminded of my yuff in Nova Scotia by this policy piece on combatting alcohol dependency and homelessness in the UK:

…the relationship works both ways. Living without a safe, stable home can make alcohol-related harm worse and make it much harder for someone to improve their health or reduce their drinking. People find themselves trapped in a catch 22. There are an estimated 650,000 people who are alcohol dependent in England and Wales. Around 70,000 of those are homeless or at immediate risk of homelessness. Yet people with the most complex needs can find themselves with the fewest accommodation options.

Those are rational numbers. About 1% are alcohol dependent and about 10% of that have associated homelessness risk or reality. I say I am reminded of my Nova Scotia of the 1980s as every case of beer said “includes health tax” on the box. Which we all knew meant “if you want this now, you’ll want funded health services later.” Connecting tax to need is good policy.

Finally, in response to Jeff‘s post confirming he is moving away from freelancing while keep writing on beer, Boak and Bailey shared this thought with their Bluesky footnote merged in at the end for completeness:

…there’s no shortage of great beer writing in 2026. As we expressed it on BlueSky, part of the problem is too much competition for too little paying work. It’s like when a second specialist cheese shop opened in Bristol and immediately put the original cheese shop out of business. How much cheese do people need? BlueSky: It’s always felt to us as if there’s a living to be had for about, say, 8 beer writers. And there are about 150 competing for that work.

First, many cheese shops please. [Ed.: isn’t that why one travels the day trip to Montreal roundtrip twice a year without staying overnight?] Why yes it is, voice from off stage left. But to the point, I looked back through the archives as I am pretty sure I have also maintained reasonableness of the eight to ten beer pro writer limit, too. And by this I mean primary household income. Most writers only writing on the topic of beer and brewing do not make enough to keep the lights on and never will. It’s the nature of the beast But a few will. And additional consulting, a bit of PR, working behind the scenes at beer judging events, teaching classes, publishing ads are all good ways to make the money that by-the-word rates do not.  Fourteen years ago Stan and I shared emails on that tough road, me sharing my line from back then “…for all the money in beer, there’s no money in beer…” which led me back to his 2009 post “The End of Beer Writing as We Know It?”:****

In commenting on the demise of the British-based magazine Beers of the World writer Adrian Tierney-Jones has written such a lovely headline that I have to find an excuse to repeat it: “Beers Of The World finito: the end of beerwriting as we know it?” If you live in the U.S. you likely never read this magazine, which could be found occasionally at the random Barnes & Noble… Adrian concludes that magazines devoted to beer have no future in the U.K. and that “makes me think that maybe this is the end of beer-writing as we have known it since the 1970s. We are all beer bloggers now.”

Yup, it comes in waves. Stan went on to quote from Alice Feiring, the wine writer:

As I’ve been saying for a while now: blogs didn’t kill journalism. blogs killed writing. The art of writing is now essentially fully devalued. It’s a hobby.

That’s seventeen years ago.  An earlier wave. And that was a thing in 2009: “beer bloggers ruin everything!” [Note: bloggers ruined movies about beer, too, apparently by noting they were not very interesting. Frigging bloggers.] Writing doesn’t give a crap about the medium. And, well, most of the few paid pro writers around now got where they are through blogging so not sure that Feiring’s logic has held up well. There’s always been other troubles. Folk feeling free to take content in 2011.   In around 2018 there was still a problem for folk wanting to write about beer as well as Mr. Beeson noted:

Casual observation: there’s a lot of beer writers/ photographers/ communicators out of or looking for work at the moment. If you’re in the industry and looking to improve your communications/ marketing you should really consider hiring some of these very talented individuals… A lot of people see what people like us do for a living and think it’s all press trips, freebies and getting drunk for a living. I can assure you the reality is more living in constant fear about making enough money to pay the rent and stay afloat. Hardly living the dream.

It is definitely a tough row to hoe even if writing is a pleasure and will remain so. Many I have watched and read have packed in their beer writing over the near quarter century (Ed.: “yikes!!”) that I have wasted as I have scribbled about beer here and in magazine articles and in books – and in all that time it’s not the writing itself that has turned people off. It’s as much or more the lack of decent money, the unwelcome surplus of the alcohol of obligation, the offer of a better job that frowns upon independent expression. Like doing squats in your 60s, writing is a good thing in itself. So write. It’s lovely.

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

*My old pal Neil with the fabulous voice … But I also have Bertrand Russell’s book in a pile of books, too, backing up Neil’s info. Who knew the Pope wiped out the Cathars in the Albigensian Crusade of the early 1200s? Must have slept in back at the dorms through that discussion when I took Foundation Year the first time around in 1981-82. Must have.
**Also see this from Ray of B+B on LinkedIn: “Content designers: invite engineers, business analysts and product owners to your crits! Engineers, BAs and POs: go along if you’re invited! A crit (or critique session) is how designers quickly test their logic and iterate their designs. We put our work so far on a board (virtual or physical) and invite everyone to tell us what they like, what doesn’t work, where they’ve got ideas, and where they’ve got questions. I love having technical and product colleagues in the room for content crits because they have fresh eyes and different perspectives.“
** and 1/2. See also this from Laura Wednesday morning on the function of both received assumptions and challenging received assumptions: “In the past, we’ve had the big brewers (bad), the regional family brewers (good) and small independents (good but only available locally). That simple model is hopelessly out of date now, but I can’t recall having seen anyone attempt to classify breweries with a little more nuance. The industry is also a lot bigger and there are a lot more companies of different sizes who are aiming for different outcomes – passion, people, product, profit… The problem I’m having is that I can’t quite put my finger on why it might be important or useful to do this (incredibly complicated) exercise, beyond the fact that it might help to challenge people’s assumptions. But is that useful in itself? I put myself at your mercy on the way to York.“
***And on travel writing: “Most travel writers are wimps. They don’t take risks. They’re writing about ‘I met my relatives in Italy’ or ‘I got a divorce. I fell in love.’ I’m interested in someone whose yacht sank.” Who writes about the sunk yachts in beer?
****Scroll down to the comments where the discussion between Stan and the late Jack Curtain (along with the others who join in) are a real treat.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Happily Corduroy and Tweed Clad Beery News Notes For Mid-October 2026

It’s now full on autumn here. “True” Thanksgiving last weekend* was great, thanks for asking. Had a gravy juice.** We’ve already taken drives to have a look at the multi-coloured leaves in the forests. And the walks down to the shore now need a bit of tweed instead of the linen shorts of a few weeks ago. Chilly. But it’s all going to be OK. Winter is coming. That’s all. by the way, I might be a bit short this week. Been busy, working on a PowerPoint presentation for a community group on the history of brewing and drinking in my fair city from the 1780s to 1860s. There are 55 minutes to fill, 37 slides to show… and (so far) four signed up attendees. Should be very exciting. Me. A former elementary school classroom. And that uncomfortable echo.

At the far more elevated all-pro level of a similar thing, Knut paid a visit to the museum in Oslo to speak with Ingebjørg Kopperud Eidhammer, Senior Curator on her dissertation There Is Great Care Behind a Glass of Beer: The Role of Knowledge in the Establishment of Modern Beer in Christiania, 1840-1890:

The starting point is one of the museum’s real treasures: the Ringnes Brewery Archive. The scale is impressive, around 150 shelf meters… There are brewing logs meticulously filled out by brewmasters. An accounting ledger from Schous Brewery dating from 1838. Collections of labels. Advertising material. Diplomas, drawings and photographs. The oldest book on the table dates from before lager beer made its breakthrough in Norway. The ledger offers small glimpses into a society where breweries maintained connections far beyond their own gates. Among the customers we find Christiania Tukthus, a workhouse which purchased malt and brewed beer for its own use.

Conversely, the race to meaninglessness has found another gear as drinks branders have embraced “clean” according to TDB:

… the market has a strong desire for “clean” food and drinks. More than half (52%) of all US consumers are willing to pay more for beverages that support health and wellness goals, and 58% are paying attention to ingredients, according to the recent Consumer Beverage Survey from EY. Wellness is no longer niche, and it’s not relegated to wheatgrass shots and green juice either. As ingredient awareness increasingly shapes what people want to put in their bodies, even at happy hour, the Clean Alcohol Collective (CAC), a coalition of like-minded wine, spirits, beer and ready-to-drink brands, is offering what it believes is a transparent solution to a complex problem.

Lordy. What else is going on? Well, near the end of last week, news broke about the closing of Marston Brewery in Burton, England with some less than reassuring comment from the owners as reported in The Times by their excellently titled Leisure Industries Correspondent Jessica Newman:

Paul Davies, chief executive of Carlsberg Britvic, said the decision was made to ensure the company’s portfolio caters to today’s customer demand. “The stark reality is that UK cask ale volumes have more than halved in less than a decade and this trend looks set to continue across the UK,” he said. “That said, smaller ale brands are much-loved by select consumers and we will do everything we can to ensure they thrive under more specialist or local ownership in the future.”

Others closer on the ground have shared more. The Tand shared his thoughts on the consequences for the Bass Ale brand:

… it seems that Carlsberg will consider transferring the brands it will no longer brew to others. I suppose these brands will be at a guess, Banks’s, Courage, Brakspear, Ringwood, Eagle (Waggledance etc.), Tetley and I suppose the Marstons brands such as Pedigree. The big questions is who would want them and who has the capacity to brew them?  Is there really much appeal when the brands are twice or more removed from their former heartlands? Even if they are sold, handed over, contracted out or whatever, that’s more difficult than you might think. There aren’t many large ale breweries left.  And then there is the question of what happens to Draught Bass which accounts for around 40,000 UK barrels of the current output of the estimated 240,000 barrels being currently produced at Shobnall Road.

Speaking of deep and abiding heritage, Jordan gave well deserved praise to the timely and well-placed can of Moosehead Lager brewed by Canada’s oldest independent brewery:

Moosehead became can-dominant in the last five years and the beer is now immeasurably better. I get a room full of people to tell me about Moosehead about once a semester and they use words like, “floral” and “berry-like” and “raspberry-cane” and “moussy” and “flinty” and sometimes even “mossy” to describe Moosehead Lager. I ask them, at the end of this exercise, “Desert Island, gun to your head, you can only drink one of these beers for the rest of your life. By a show of hands, what are you choosing?” The last three to four years, the answer has been Moosehead Lager. 

And Lars wrote a blog post about his new book, The Power of Beer, on the unifying theory behind it “explaining why I wrote it, and what I’m trying to do with it” and here it is:

What power am I talking about? Well, archaeology shows us that chieftains and rulers used opulent drinkware and costly drinks to impress subjects, warriors, and rivals. To take just one example, some Danish warlord apparently served drink from two drinking horns made of pure gold, and today the gold alone is valued at about 1 million USD. In the Iron Age even iron was precious, so the gold value back then must have been enough to make people’s heads spin. And this was all done for political purposes, as you’ll see. That is just one example in a very long list from prehistory.

Perhaps less definitive of cultural heritage, thanks to Liam, I saw this article about a new wobbly Japanese beer glass:

A craft beer producer in central Japan is hoping that its U-shaped “wobbly” glass will encourage people to drink water along with their beer, in a bid to prevent excessive alcohol consumption and dehydration. The “Wobbly Beer Glass by Yona Yona Ale,” produced by Yoho Brewing based in Nagano prefecture has been on sale since August amid growing awareness of the need for responsible drinking. The idea is that the glass, divided into two sections, will tilt if a balance between beer and water is not maintained.

Thoughts? First, for an Atlantic Canadian with a certain shanty singing tavern dwelling past, the name Yoho Brewing is simply excellent.  Second, this idea makes zebra striping seem very very sensible by comparison. As you think on that, here’s some notes:

Note #1:  “Self-Portrait with Beer Glass”, Siegfried Shalom Sebba, 1928.
Note #2: “It’s a green bottle of Stella Unfiltered. I like Stella Unfiltered.”
Note #3: “… nobody outside of Georgia really cares about qvevri wine…”
Note #4: a photographic exhibit on Bank’s Brewery of Wolverhampton.

Business news time. You may not care but I found an actually interesting BrewDog related story over at BMI:

Tilray’s 23% gain to $257 mil in “record first quarter revenue,” as well as huge 82% boost to $101.5 mil in bev revs all driven by BrewDog, execs shared during co’s fiscal 1st qtr last Thur. BrewDog added an incremental $55.9 mil to co’s revs during the qtr, CFO Carl Merton noted. Without it, co’s existing biz dipped about 4%, off around $8.3 mil. But its US-centric craft bev biz fell 18%, by over $10 mil to $45.6 mil.So BrewDog “transformed our beverage business”…

Would I ever buy the stuff? Why would I need to? Still, a good Canadian success story in challenging times.  Conversely, me I like a clubby spot. There was a second story pub in St. John’s Newfoundland that had a sofa room. And my undergrad pub was full of sofas. Sofas, however, are not universally loved as B+B argue:

We’re not fans of sofas in pubs. We sink into them, they make us drowsy, and they make us feel as if we’re at home. Not in the sense of homeliness; as in, why did we bother coming out? It’s not even as if they’re usually especially comfortable. You’ll see people perched on the edge of the cushions, leaning forward, as if they’re not stopping for long. Most frequently, people sitting on the sofa in a pub are using it as a sort of waiting area, hoping that a proper table becomes available soon. What we’re wondering is, were they always there, these great lumps of useless soft furniture? 

Perhaps it’s because I am a great useless lump myself that I love a sofa. I find many sorts of pub furnative uncomfortable. The unergonomic bar stool. The evil tall legged chair at the wobbly tall table.

Now, perhaps getting all a bit meta on you, this week’s interesting feature on the pubs of Great Yarmouth by Anthony Bennett in Pellicle included a passage that I really appreciate – a simple and even subtle explanation of the point:

Great Yarmouth reportedly has more pubs per capita than any other town in Britain. “We have lost a lot of pubs in the past 25 years, but I’m pleased to say very few in the last 10,” says the Red Herring’s landlord, Darren Grice. “There are still many, and the reason for their survival is they all cater for a different type of customer. There are four categories: pint drinkers, in particular real ale; food pubs; sports pubs; and the vodka-and-coke karaoke bars. All these pubs all sort of get along, and are still here by staying open and being aware of their limitations. Today, my focus is on four of those real ale pubs.”

Semi-keener readers of Hobbes’ Leviathan (when a miserable student in some decade past) will recall that all you need to read is chapter 13 where he summarizes everything else. Jesus did the same sorta thing with the Sermon from the Mount, right? This is not that. This is the most subtle guidance. The smiling host guiding you to your table. The helpful sign upon the path. We are someetimes told that the best  do not tell what they are writing, they just write… but who are the best? Really? Just not sure? A little nod in the right direction is appreciated.

Even more expository was Will Hawkes this week on the potential limits of the lyrical:

“When I drink London Black, I can almost hear the chimes of Big Ben,” Adrian Tierney-Jones tells a sizeable crowd at Tottenham’s Big Penny Social. Crikey. This is the Brewers Congress, an annual jamboree of brewery-industry drinking and talks, and Tierney-Jones, as lyrical as ever, is treating a selection of brewers and fellow travellers to his thoughts on the importance of “a sense of place”… It’s an interesting point, and ‘a sense of place’ has long powered wine sales, but one wonders how it applies to modern London. The truth is that locally-produced beer has rarely been less popular here – and certainly not in the past 15 years. Most Londoners, it seems, have increasingly little interest in London-brewed beer.

Lordly Lordy!*** Not quite fingerpointing and handbaggery but a rug may well have been pull. Aaaaannnnnd… that’s it for now. As I said, a shorter list due to distraction but also a bit of a quieter set of offerings too. For for another hit of beer news, please check out Boak and Bailey’s postings on each and every Saturday along with the coincidenal and fabulously entertaining footnotes week after week at Patreon. Such an effort! And do look out for more of Stan’s “One Link, One Paragraph” format. There was a good link to a nano brewery this week. Then it’s your turn. Read and recommend, please. Scour the world for news tips – then let me know. Then hunt out something in someone’s archives! Leave oblique comments on someone’s post from 2009!! Listen to a few of Lew’s podcasts and get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on certain Fridays. And Phil Mellows is at the BritishBeerBreaks. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter. Do sign up for Katie’s wonderful self-governing totes autonomous website featuring The Gulp, too.  Ben’s Beer and Badword remains on pause but there is reading at The Glass which is going back to being a blog. Any more? We have Ontario’s own A Quick Beer and All About Beer is still offering a range of podcasts – and there’s also Mike Seay’s The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast! And there’s the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube as well as the archives of the Beer Ladies Podcast. What else?

*Here’s an excellent description of how we do it.
**Slug of Crown Royal, half a can of cider, half a can of ginger beer on ice. You’re welcome. ***Yes, I said it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Cooler Yet Still Cozy Beery News Notes For The First Hints Of The Coming Autumn

view of man laying asleep on a sofa

The author in his natural state…

Here we are again. Me, I am semi-bachelor boy this week as the last two kids moved into their own places across town over the summer and the Euro-eldest is hosting herself and an aunt. So… here I am and, obviously, I have, you know… chores. Winter, after all, is coming. Which more obviously means I am pulling out and inspecting the state of my sweater vests and cardigans, rearranging the coffee mug shelf, writing about 1820s taverns, preparing a powerpoint for a late October presentation on beer related newspaper notices 1790s to 1840 from my fair City – and doing anything or nothing else I can think of to avoid being useful like putting my hand on a caulking gun or emptying out the eavestroughs. All as I scratch at the mosquito bites from just crawling through the tomato patch out in the yard earlier this week. Best to stay inside. Winter is, after all, coming.

Before moving on the news, a note from the editorial staff. I was reading in The New Yorker by Jill Lepore oddly titled “Bot or Not” in the physical magazine but “Are You A Human?” online. Two things stuck out bluntly in the article. First, the function of reCAPTCHA gatekeeping online isn’t about you clicking the botton to tell them you are a human but to watch you as you click to determine how your cursor movement proves you are. Plus the moment taken to do so allows the bot to scour your activity to back up your claim to humanity.* The other thing noted is this:

…at this point there are more bots online than people. To deal with this problem, businesses retain bot-detection and bot-management firms, a specialty within the field of cybersecurity. Their task used to be to block bots, but, with the rise of agentic A.I., that has changed. Now the problem is how to let in the good bots (like the avatar you send to the Gap to buy you a new pair of pants) and keep out the bad bots (like the thief trying to scrape the data of every Gap customer). **

All of which is to say that it is becoming a bit harder to find actual real stories online to read and share with you. Thankfully, a number of you message me one way or another with tips. In the comments, via BlueSky, by email and via DMs, too. Tips are fabulous. Always appreciated. Unless you are a bot. Unless you are that Vietnamese A.I. slop farm that’s just layering digital shit upon shit. You suck.

plaque on pink stone wall indicating exact international boundary between Canada and the USA located at Thousand Islands BridgeNow with the beery news. Let’s start with the bigger picture, the Canadian-US tariff battles continue and have already had a serious effect on Ontario’s brewing industry:

Japanese brewer Sapporo says it will move some beer production from Canada to the US after new tariffs on Canadian beer took effect on Tuesday. The move follows the introduction of a 50% tariff on beer imported from Canada. For companies shipping beer across the border, that means significantly higher costs. Chief strategy officer Rieko Shofu described tariffs as “something out of our control,” telling Bloomberg that the beer giant would “move ahead with local production.” Sapporo did not immediately respond to the BBC’s request for comment. The company plans to shift production of its non-alcoholic beer, currently made in Canada for US customers, to the US by the first half of 2027.

Sapporo’s Unibroue operations in Quebec remain unaffected for now. Late in the evening on Tuesday, the Wizened Orange Fuzz announced that not only are there going to be tariffs but complete import bans:

The White House posted five new executive orders Tuesday evening that exclude certain Canadian products from being imported into the U.S., alcohol among them. The administration is also adding more Canadian goods to the list of those that are subject to 50 per cent tariffs. A sweeping ban on Canadian booze is set to take effect on Sept. 29. “The following products of Canada are excluded from importation into the United States,” says Trump’s ban on Canadian alcohol, going on to list beer, wine, cider, whiskies, vodka and other spirits.

Interestingly, however, they also announced the lifting of tariffs on other Canadian goods of equal value. Things we sell that Americans actually need like toilet paper and concrete. I live by the border as you know and that last item is a relief locally as limestone is made into cement around here from quarried stone that is burned in a massive kiln. The resulting powder is then sailed by cargo ship the few miles south to Oswego NY across the lake where the cement is used to make city sidewalks and skyscrapers. Another thing we will think about tomorrow as we remember the twenty-fifth.

Elsewhere and more happily, Knut has written about three breweries who were showing their wares when he visited the Trondheim Brewery Festival including the northernmost brewery in the world:

Svalbard Bryggeri, the northernmost in the world, was present for the first time. The founder of the brewery, Robert, has had an uphill battle to get it all started. The first obstacle was the legislation – the production of alcohol was banned in Svalbard. The bureaucracy was bewildered and not particularly eager to do something about it, but years of lobbying finally gave fruit. The first brew was made in 2015. There are more challenges in running a brewery under arctic conditions – water supply is one of them. But the water treatment for the brewery has a side effect – they also supply clean drinking water to the local community. They have their own brewery tap in Longyearbyen, Vinmonopolet and pubs and bars on the Norwegian mainland also offer their beers. Norwegian airlines have Svalbard beer on some of their routes…

Coming up on twenty years ago (!) when this was a multi-author beer blog, Knut wrote about traveling to find Kroa, what was then the most northerly bar in the world, back when Svalbard was known as Spitzbergen. Svalbard Bryggeri appears to be about a kilometre north of Kroa.

To the south, Boak and Bailey have begun their reports on their vacation to the Czech Republic including thoughts from… err… sorry… impressions of Prague as well as from Brno. Other than them needing to take tips from Ron on insightful breakfast buffet reportage, these are fabuous descriptions with this caveat from their BlueSky account:

We landed on this ‘impressions of’ format a few years ago because we dread anyone thinking that we’re daring to offer a ‘definitive guide’ to somewhere we’ve only visited on holiday. Our very first blog post back in 2007 was carefully titled ‘Nice places to drink in…’ for the same reason.

Bravissimo! And always a great reminder that it is wise to first listen to the person’s views from there… wherever “there” is. Then… go wander around there (or anywhere) yourself and report back on that, too.

Reporting back himself is Will Hawkes. His monthly London Beer City newsletter features the history of The Pembroke of Earl’s Court – previously The Coleherne – probably London’s most famous gay pub:

It appeared in Armistead Maupin’s Babycakes (“He walked several blocks past high-windowed brick buildings to a gay pub called the Coleherne … He ordered a gin and tonic and stood at the bulletin board reading announcements about Gay Tory meetings and ‘jumble sales’ to benefit deaf lesbians.”) and the Stranglers’ 1977 tune Hanging Around (‘I’m moving in the Coleherne/ With the leather all around me /And the sweat is getting steamy /But their eyes are on the ground /They’re just hanging around’). Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett were regulars…  The Coleherne was well-established by the 1970s; it had first attracted gay customers in the 1950s, at a time when it was becoming a centre for jazz, too. Trinidadian pianist Russell Henderson first played here in 1962, launching its golden era. Sunday lunchtimes in the 60s and 70s brought together a diverse range of musicians, from British R&B pioneer Graham Bond to “Philly Joe” Jones, who played with Miles Davies. The likes of Mick Jagger and Georgie Fame came to enjoy the music.

Somewhat related but perhaps for another snack bracket is The Telegraph‘s weekly question on cultural matters asked what is the perfect quantity of beer? The responses were largely identical:

Jim Henny wrote: “As a nearly 50-year-old male, I can’t think of any scenario where I might order a half. Might as well not bother.” I also enjoyed this, from Ron Giddnes: “My wife’s plain-speaking Geordie uncle, when asked whether he wanted a pint or a half, replied that he had tried a half once but didn’t like it.” Malcolm Monaghan, meanwhile, identified a genuine hazard of smaller measures: “A friend went through a short phase of switching to halves, in an attempt to reduce his alcohol consumption. It was a disaster. He’d scoop the wee measures, and ended up drinking about 50 per cent more than the rest of us who were on the pints.”

Halfs are for boozers! Who knew? Who can afford such self-subterfuge? As we consider that in these tightening times, here are some notes:

Note #1: product placement tie-in alert!
Note #2: BREAKING!! “….you’ll be rewarded with a mild ranch dressing flavor…”
Note #3: London’s Mayor loves the nightlife.

I haven’t visited the fam in Scotland to hit the pubs for some years now as Euro-daughter has been playing that role BUT I have some sympathy to this opinion from Alcohol Focus Scotland as set out in The Times:

Carolyn Lochhead, chief executive of the charity Alcohol Focus Scotland, took a dim view of the Tartan Army chanting “no Scotland, no party” while boozing in Boston’s bars. Lochhead, in a new blog, expressed concern that alcohol consumption is what makes Scots fun and that it had been woven into the public consciousness… Hamish Husband, from the Association of Tartan Army Clubs, said Lochhead was not wrong to suggest football fans took great delight in drinking exploits. However, he noted that the fans had given $10,000 to Hasbro Children’s hospital cancer unit and about $5,000 to the Rhode Island Pipers, and other good causes had also benefited.

The article also notes that Scottish overall consumption as measured in pure alcohol is down about 20% since just 2017. Which is good. (By comparison, however, the percentage reduction for party without Scotland remains at 100%.) Not so good, however, for the clinky PR folk seemingly writing for influencers and, you know, bots who seem to have landed, for now, on lumping together the concept that the young have “increased spending on travel, hospitality and alcohol in the past year” to fudge the drop in spending on drink. I hear young people today are spending more on [rent+drinking] as well.

Conversely and speaking from a more reality based reality, BMI continues to trace the drop in US craft beer sales with a fabulously named expert in the field, Bump Williams:

Retailers “already making some early ‘calls’ on shelf space for 2027 and unfortunately, craft once again seems to be on the block for losing more space,” Bump wrote. But Bump also took “closer look” at total craft to “hopefully persuade some retailers NOT to toss ALL craft into the beer-grinder of lost causes because roughly 1/3 of all craft brand families are enjoying some growth.” In aggregate, craft declining at steeper pace than total beer. Segment $$ sales down 4.6% while total biz down 3.6% in NIQ yr-to-date thru Aug 15. Tho that’s less of a gap than last yr when total beer $$ were down 3.2%, craft -5.2%.

Another sort of shift has been discussed by Eric Asimov, who regrets the move away from cabernet sauvignon – as it’s been tagged as something of your aged parents’ wine:

A lot of bad, unbalanced, over-the-top cabernet wines have shaped these attitudes. In the heyday of American cabernet sauvignon and Bordeaux, say, from 1985 to 2010, which coincides with the most influential period of those wine publications, the prevailing style of Napa cabernet increasingly became the high alcohol, sweetly fruity oak bomb. Many Bordeaux were so highly polished that any distinguishing features had been eliminated. These wines have rightly receded in popularity, though they still have their fans. Yet I fear their legacy has been to turn people off from the grape rather than the style. This is a shame, but it is not unusual.

As we see in craft beer, we might have been oversold the idea of the obscure or even the obscured as the new and improved. And Jeff may be describing a similar shift of sorts when it comes to the fresh hop beers of Oregon this year:

I noticed this trend last year, and it seems even more prominent this year: breweries using fresh hops as an accent in beers with high loads of conventional hops. The effect is a diminished or absent fresh hop note (in what may otherwise be great beers). During fresh hop season, I don’t merely want great beer, though; I want beers that glow green. As breweries begin to downplay the fresh hops, this worries me… brewers, use MAOR fresh hops! Make them glow green! 

Green! Speaking of which and finally, did you know that Nottingham was originally called Snotengaham?***  This is not a fact I picked up from this week’s feature in Pellicle by Pete Blackburn which, otherwise, provides a very interesting view into the revivial of Nottingham’s beer scene:

The famous Shipstones “Star,” and the Robin Hood silhouette of Home Brewery, proudly adorned those buildings. Streets hummed with the pungent scents of malt and hops, and hundreds of pubs carried their names. These breweries sponsored Nottingham’s two football clubs. You chose your team: Nottingham Forest or Notts County. And then, you pledged loyalty to “Shippo’s” or Home Ales. Those legendary local breweries are now long gone, joined in their demise by the much-loved Mansfield and Hardy & Hansons breweries. But while their landmark buildings, still standing, now serve other purposes, a new cast of beer and brewing advocates are putting Nottingham firmly back on the map.

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

*The article also explains that the “which images have a bicycle?” test is really used to train the borg behind the internets to read images like a human. And the “what letters and numbers are these?” test actual is used to correct errors in scans of books. The borg doesn’t give a shit about you and your identity confirmations. You are already on lists.
**The New Yorker, Aug 17 edition, page 20.
***Snottingham!! How mah-chur of me. What’s that? Well, sure, I don’t disagree. It could well be beneath you to be reading this sort of stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Sweaty Dog Days Edition Of These Beery News Notes For Mid-August

Well, it’s gone quiet around here again. The Euro-branch of the clan has moved to the other end of the lake before taking the skies and heading home. But first they took in a game Wednesday between the Jays and the Sox, as illustrated. $17.28 CND with a bit of a tip for that Bud. Lordy. No wonder I stick to high end rare vintage ports. Long time readers will recall that we are a Red Sox family due to the Boston branch of the clan so it’s good that the seats up there are empty around the fam. Hissing carries only so far when one is in enemy territory.

Enough of that. There must be some news to share. Let’s see. First up, how about some old beer… really old beer:

A sealed bronze bottle placed in a tomb in northwestern China more than 2,000 years ago has yielded something archaeologists rarely encounter: not a stain or microscopic residue, but 3.74 liters of surviving liquid.

And upon the news of some not quite as old but still old beer, Liam shared some fine responsive research related to the discovery of a bottle of Guinness in a 162 year old shipwreck and word of some plans to recreate something from the contents:

As to the beer itself, a lot has been made in the recent news regarding the plans to harvest the yeast from the bottle in order to rebrew the beer. This would be impossible to do from just regenerating or even matching the yeast for a number of reasons, not least being that it probably contained not one yeast strain but several, including less conventional brewing yeasts such as Brettanomyces and Lactobacillus… In order to explain why the yeast is just a small, if important, factor in the beer’s recipe we need to look at what exactly constituted Guinness Extra Stout in the 1860s, and luckily, we have a good and reliable second-hand source for that…

Liam goes into some detail to show how both the ingredients and processes of the time differ greatly from those used today making a replication perhaps impossible. Gotta love a post with twelve footnotes and the trust they provide.

And with similar authenticity, Boak and Bailey are fine purveyors of quality positivity and that integrity serves them well in their piece this week on how they have seen some solid professional behaviour from the staff in pubs lately:

We’ve long said that the main thing we want from bar staff is to feel as if they’re engaging with us like fellow human beings. We try not to be annoying, no doubt we fail from time to time, and no doubt customers collectively are an infuriating bunch. But people who are able to come to each interaction with the slate wiped clean, assuming the best, make for the best bar people… [W]e also get the impression that this particular barperson is adept at matching the energy of the customer: want to talk, they’ll talk; want to keep it business-like, that’s fine, too. This is another great skill and one that requires a significant degree of social sensitivity.

That’s a great point. Both the high energy guy and the quiet inside joke clique can get irritating quickly. Staying with news from the tavern, there’s some surprising legal news out of Germany as youth may not be having its way any longer:

The German government said Wednesday it would scrap a legal provision that has allowed 14- and 15-year-olds to purchase and consume alcohol with their parents. The government said the abolition of so-called “accompanied drinking” would “protect young people from the considerable health and social effects of alcohol consumption”. The minimum age for drinking beer, wine and champagne is 16, rising to 18 for spirits and other harder drinks.

Fourteen? Just to be clear, a form of this sort of thing in the family home is also one of the little known permissive laws of Ontario* – but I don’t know anyone who would exercise that right with 14 year olds. Full disclosure: I assure all that I am quite sure I fully abided by the law with the greatest care during the tender teen years in my own life. Definitely.

Note #1: a desperate attempt to coat tail on yesterday’s PR?

What else is going on? Well, out on the road… or rather the rails… Ron’s maple-laced holidays in central Canada with his sons continues with reports from both Ottawa and Montreal published now. It’s always interesting to experience your area through the eyes of another. At one of the capital’s Royal Oak pubs he found yet another disappointing IPA:

We kick off with onion rings and poutine. Which are pretty good. After the first round I switch to whisky. I’ve had enough of hazy IPA. “All the IPAs seem to be sludgy here in Canada.” I say forlornly. “That’s what the kids want nowadays.” Andrew replies. “They could have at least one normal IPA for oldies like me.” “Any excuse to switch to whisky, eh, Dad.” Alexei remarks cynically. “It’s their fault for an uninspiring beer selection.” “Not yours for being a pisshead?” Alexei asks. “Fuck off.”

He’s encountered the sludge at a number of spots. The trail of sludge, this vacation of his. Educational for we Canucks, as The Bard hissell would have wanted.

Note #2: is “mid-strength” some PR committee’s phrase for “weaker”?

Now some politics. First, click for a “no standing pub” joke.  See, people are reacting to suggestions that “standing pubs” or “vertical drinking” in London get banned. I think the phrase really means “standing around outside the pub while drinking” pubs but happy to be corrected. Speaking of correction, Westminster City Council has released a myth bustin’ communiqué:

You may have read media reports suggesting Westminster City Council is planning to ban people from standing up in pubs, or ‘vertical drinking’. This is completely untrue. There is not, and never has been, a plan to stop people standing in pubs to have a drink. We want people to enjoy our fantastic pubs and bars, and we want them to do that safely. Our licensing consultation is asking people about the best way to ensure our venues can serve the millions of people who visit London and the West End every year.

Note: the word “in” is carrying some weight there in that press release. What about out on the pavement? The Telegraph‘s daily newsletter included some responses on the issue this week including these two observations:

Alan Hanna added: “Some of us have spent the best hours of our lives standing outside pubs moving between groups of friends, sharing rounds, smoking and having a wonderful few hours to let off steam before going home. I am so pleased that my adult children and their wives enjoy the same. This is one of the highlights of London.”

Not everyone was a fan, though. One reader countered: “Pavement boozing directly outside a pub is one thing but, human nature being what it is, people push the boundaries, literally and metaphorically. The anti-social aspect affects nearby residents, and why should their quality of life be considered less important?”

Being dull and helpful (in addition to sludge brewers) we don’t do this in Canada. I have done it myself, however, in Syracure NY in the before times when one went south for fun and freedom but it’s a bit unnerving when you don’t know the unwritten rules about when and where it is OK and when it’s not.

And still more sides of the politics of beer have been discussed on both sides of the Atlantic this week. In England, real or cask ale has become associated with the right wing of the political spectrum. With a H/T to David**,  Michael Deakin of Caskapital found an ominous note in an SNL UK skit:

The clip showed a dystopic future in which Nigel Farage had become Prime Minister. He sat at a desk in No.10 flanked by St. George’s cross’ and to his right was a hand pull beer engine, from which he helped himself to a decidedly flat looking pint of golden ale. Whilst this scene is disturbing in a number of ways, the presence of the hand pull really made me think. How often have I seen Farage portrayed like this, and when did real ale become an icon of fascism? 

Err… cause fascists prefer their symbols and icons given the associated distasteful substance? And at the western end of the USA, Jeff discussed the holding of a political event at a local bewery for a national Republical leader and Trump ally:

…Trap Door is not some rando brewery. They are a darling of the increasingly robust Vancouver corps of breweries, and have won tons of medals, including back-to-back golds in the fresh hop IPA category at GABF. Whether this will, ahem, take the shine off the brewery long term is something we’ll have to wait and see. Many of you know my politics, which I haven’t hidden. Nevertheless, I’m a little uncomfortable with the idea that the mere act of hosting a political event becomes such a polarizing act for a brewery. They have become community meeting places, which is fantastic, honestly. Hosting political events is a democratic act, and I am loath to punish a brewery for it. But in this case, the owner is a political actor, and he’s using his brewery to advance a political agenda. 

I don’t know if I can separate the two like that. But that’s me. First, I don’t really care what the politics of a brewery or pub owner are… as long as they aren’t any sort of authoritarian dictatorial militaristic criminal cabalist of any stripe. I am also sure I do not want to share space with any political rally that doesn’t not match my personal preferences – and even then the rally, if we are being honest, really should be held someplace else. Frankly, I don’t care for any sort of group meetings taking over part of a pub or restaurant or shop or, you know, parking lot in which I find myself located at any particular time. Pubs especially need to be reserved for disorganized noisy wild drunken fun or quiet less drunken yet still disorganized fun – or, sure, disorganized events falling somewhere in between. But no pamphlets. No speeches. No thanks.

Speaking of the holding of little meetings to get everyone on the same page, this preemptive messaging over on LinkedIn from the BA last Tuesday was pretty odd. Apparently anticipatory angst about Wednesday’s Gallup polling on US alcohol use was expected to be so neg for the booze trade that the poll needed to be discredited before it was released! As you know, rooting for booze is a weird thing… but if that thing is your job I guess it’s gotta be your thing, right? Still, for a booster organization that’s seen consumption of its particular sector of booze drop almost 20% since 2019, it’s also a pretty weak stance. I mean, I have been on trade association boards, radio station boards and counselled many government and administrative bodies and I can’t imagine ever recommending directly mocking obviously correct stats. Find another way in at the root cause, if you need to. Or accept the numbers and advise accordingly, perhaps. It’s big boy pants time. But in the booze trade? Never.

Finally, here’s an interesting development. We are told that as of 2 August, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act now has new provisions at Article 50 which obliges those using A.I. (to develop text and images along with other content) to disclose that activity if the context is available in Europe. Even if the author isn’t in Europe. For me, that means I have to look out for readers like The Brew Nut to make sure things stay pure. So… could cutting an pasting wicked (pittui!!!) A.I. text in one of the paragraphs quoted above leave me at risk under the new law? Well, fortunately for me acknowledgement is something of a defence, if not an excuse, so I will be adding my note right here right now to confirm that I have no idea if the above cited sources violate EU law but offer no comfort that they don’t. In fact, I don’t believe any of it. Not a word. You shouldn’t either. Beware! Take heed! Govern yourselves accordingly.

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

*Section 34 of the Liquor Licence and Control Act, 2019 prohibits underage drinkgin but states this at subsection 34(5): “This section does not apply to the consumption of liquor by a person under 19 years of age who consumes liquor in a residence or in a private place as prescribed by the regulations, if the liquor was provided to the person at that residence or private place by a parent of the person or by a person having lawful custody of the person.“
**And for a rare triple play!

The Perhaps Abbreviated “Who’s That In The Kitchen?” Edition Of Your Beery News Notes

You know how it goes. August means guests. So I have not been as idle as it relates to the beer reading and the beer writing. These are pastimes which demand a special type of slacking. One cannot succeed as a dedicated beer scribbler without setting aside the time to be inordinately idle, what in any other pursuit appears to be the disfunctions of a wastetrel.* Plus, when not hosting I have spent much of the week working with the twine and the secaturs. That right there? That was my view Wednesday morning. A deeply woven mess of tomato plants stuck on hands and knees in the patch where I had poured four year old kitchen compost. Lordy, how it grew. Now the tangle has been untanged and all they need to do is produce fruit. Let’s go bees!

There was possibly tougher news in Bigger Ag than my aching back from Stan this week as the forest fires in the Pacific Northwest are threatening the hop crop:

Monday, the Oregon Hop Growers Association issued a press release that began… “’After a few tough years with hop acreages declining as beer sales dipped, Oregon hop growers are especially excited about this year’s hop harvest. The mild spring resulted in ideal growing conditions for the hops, meaning we’re expecting great flavor and aroma,’ said Michelle Palacios, executive director of the Oregon Hop Growers Association.” What could go wrong? Smoke, as growers and brewers learned with the 2020 harvest. Wildfires in Central and Eastern Washington triggered an air quality alert in the Yakima Valley this week. It is also higher today in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, although forecasts are for more favorable conditions soon.

With that difference of focus, I’d say Stan’s concerns might not lead to the hoped for great flavour. Drew, exercising his wag skills, suggested “Celebration might have to be a rauchbier this year.” Speaking of is / not is,  Pellicle‘s feature this week is by Martin Dixon, the story of one of the more venerable NA beers, Maisel’s Weisse Alkoholfrei which has been produced for over twenty-five years:

Instead of choosing between the two commonly used methods to create alcohol-free beer—removing alcohol by an industrial process, which is straightforward but can be harsh; or stopping fermentation early, which gives the beer a fuller flavour but leaves a sweet, worty taste—the brewery used both approaches. Today, two beers are brewed (one a dealcoholised version, and one a lower-strength version) and blended to create Maisel’s Weisse Alkoholfrei. The beer is now roughly a third of Maisel’s business, and its surprise success has given the brewery new financial freedom.

Relatedly perhaps, here’s a new angle on beer and health – beer mats for better mental health:

Man Time’s Flip the Mat campaign is now under way, with the first mats being delivered to pubs, clubs and community venues across Stone and the surrounding area. Volunteer Allan has been visiting local venues with the mats, including The Poste of Stone in Granville Square, where Man Time holds its weekly meetings. One side of each mat displays the Flip the Mat campaign message. Turning it over reveals information encouraging people to talk about the difficulties they may be facing. The reverse also carries a QR code linking directly to the Man Time website, where people can find details about the group and a range of local and national support services.

And on a similar theme, in the weaving back and forth on the question of booze and health, the question of merriment as health pops up as a foundational principle on the pro side. They never seem to interview the hungover** when making these arguments but it has gotten to the point that The New York Times itself has undertaken some investigative journalism on the point sending Ginia Bellafante into the heart of Bourbon country:

“You’d be surprised by how many people around here don’t drink,” our waitress shared with us later. My dinner companion worked for the Louisville mayor’s office. She had given up drinking several years ago in the name of better sleep and general well-being, leaving her vulnerable to the joke that she was part of the problem in a city where the national retreat from alcohol was driving a list of anxieties. I had come to Louisville to gauge the collateral effects of this growing aversion, a reality propelled by science, supported by surveys and punctuated by my own experience as a host who had noticed that a longstanding dictum of entertaining — the allotment of a half bottle of wine per guest — no longer applied. For all the benefits of cutting back, certain rituals were vanishing…

The Beer Nut, of course a ritualist if ever there was one, is having none of it and took the time to examine the offerings from Marks and Sparks this week, with some observations on the claims made on the packaging:

First it’s an extremely straight-up Helles Lager, stating what it is in large capital letters on the 33cl can. It’s brewed by Cornish brewery Harbour, which does a few contractual things of this nature, as I recall. 4.5% ABV seems a little inauthentically low, and it poured without a proper head, which it definitely should not. There isn’t much aroma, but it seems broadly on-style: a snap of cracker with a hint of lemon zest. I was thirsty, so half the glass went in one gulp… In all honesty, how it tastes was not a major concern for me, but out of respect for you, specifically, I will say that it’s very plain stuff. There’s a slightly hot fruitiness, suggesting the same sort of careless brewing flaw that made it headless, but you’d barely notice that. I can’t remember how much it cost, but I’m assuming not much. Drink it cold; lie back and think of anywhere but Germany.

Cold is good. Are we prisoners of the archetype? Is a pub ever modern? To me a pub needs pubbiness or its a taproom, bar or gastro to one degree or another. B+B, however, have been more seriously on the case and reported back on refurbishment and what is considered by the redevelopers as key these days:

… when they do try to lean into the history of their buildings, they do so without much taste or sensitivity. These days, that means whacking “Ye Olde Pube” and “Gin Emporium” on the walls in bad fonts that come preloaded with Microsoft Word. The other key component of a modern old-fashioned pub is, of course, decent beer. The Kings Head, The Crown Inn and The Pembury all have interesting ranges, served in great condition, often in particularly nice glassware. The 10-sided 1930s-style pint glasses with which The Kings Head relaunched seem to have disappeared (stolen, we assume) but there are a couple of authentic 1930s half-pint glasses in the same style.

As you think on that, here’s some notes:

Notes #1:  “…and commissioned by AB InBev…”
Notes #2: Half price beer with a Mitch obit.
Note #3: A beer drinking elk?!?!

Ron himself as well as his sons have traveled to my fair neck of the woods – or at least he’s been neck adjacent – recently and has begun to report on holidaying in a forest fire smoke zone, wanders Toronto, finds a diner that also sells gin and goes to a cellar dweller’s ball game where Chicago beats the hometown Blue Jays badly:

It’s another high-scoring game. The White Sox get five runs in one innings. Then three in another. Then four. The Blue Jays hit several home runs. But with no-one on the bases, they only get a single run… A bloke a few seats along does try to get a chant going a few times. “Let’s go Blue Jays.” He shouts. It’s not the most inspiring of calls. A couple of times he does get others to join in. Until the stadium starts blasting music out again. With the Blue Jays way behind, the crowd starts thinning out after the seventh innings. We leave during the last innings. Mostly because I wanted to be sure of getting to the Steam Whistle Brewery over the road before it closes.

Ron and Sons will report on stops further east in the coming days.

The Guardian published a very handy primer on how the UK is going through a shrinkflation related to beer – now dubbed a but clumsily as “drinkflation” even though it does not relate to all drinks – and especially handy as it relates to the economics involved:

I don’t know what that amounts to. For a 4.0% beer it’s about 41p a pint. Whereas a 3.4% beer is subject to a duty of just £9.96 per litre of pure alcohol, or about 19p a pint.
That’s quite a difference, but what if people don’t like Carling’s new weak beer? The company claims the 3.4% version actually ranked “higher for overall taste” in consumer tests. It also laid the groundwork for the reduction by introducing a stronger and more expensive Black Label version in February, at 4.7%, creating a “value-premium price ladder” within the brand.
Do say: “Alcohol duty must strike a difficult balance between raising revenue and improving health.”
Don’t say: “3.4%? My urine is stronger than that.”

But, see, you said it, Ms. G. You can’t really say “don’t say it” and then go ahead and say the exactly that  one thing you say you shouldn’t say. Really. You might say there ought to be a law about these things in Britain but we also learned in that self same publication this week that:

Parliament is “Britain’s last alcohol-soaked workplace” where MPs are offered free drinks as early as midday despite alcohol-related scandals, a report has revealed. Drinking is commonplace and some MPs have had their stomachs pumped after consuming so much alcohol that they ended up in hospital, one disclosed.

Yikes! So… maybe less booze is not such a bad thing in one’s glass. Is there less booze in Maryland? Michael Stein in DC Beer went on an interesting investigation and reported out this week on the unused 100,000 barrels of capavity left behind when Flying Dog was bought by FX Matt who shut down the Maryland brewery and moved production to Beautica… err… Utica, New York***:

So, did those 100,000 barrels of 2017 go to the macros? Some did, some didn’t. The Brewers Association of Maryland’s latest data has just under 7,500 barrels brewed in Frederick County in 2025. That’s less than 10% of what Flying Dog was brewing by themselves when they left the state.  Maryland not only lost 100,000 barrels of Flying Dog, they lost DuClaw, and much of Guinness’ Baltimore Blonde production. In The New Brewer, DuClaw was listed in 2020 as brewing 18,250 barrels. That is a sizable amount for the majority of 9,578 craft brewers today, who annually make significantly less than that.

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

*So you know what that means? Yup, extended quotes. Cut and past. That’s my game. Anything to nudge the weekly work past 2300 words. There, 1322 words to Tuesday at 7:45 am. It’s all on track. 
**As I tell the kids, one borrows joy from the future to have boozy joy in the present. With diminishing effect over time.
***I keep telling them that I have the perfect slogan for the city!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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