A Good Beer Blog – Page 3 – Second Gen (2003-2016, 2016- )

The “Look Maw I’m A Futurist!” Edition Of These Beery News Notes

It takes a lot to be a really good futurist. First, a short memory so you forget all the failed claims you’ve made. Second, a globe and a flashlight. That’s it. Makes sense as every January, tryptophan-fuel prognostications by holiday break junior interns flood the media as we seek to live in an alternative reality. Beer is no different but just because the filla is flowin’ doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean there’s nothing interesting being said. I think of it as fan fiction. As we canvass those who took the time to mail in a “best of what’s never gonna happen” listicle, let’s just recall how we were promised in 2019 the best has yet begun for Brut IPA, in 2020 White Claw and Truly had established themselves as cool in a can and in 2021 more and more young drinkers would become fans of craft. Yup, there is a definite skill set behind the beer futurists.

UPDATE: despite the footnote below, GBH seems to have woken from its slumber and posted David Jesudason‘s piece (adding to a theme this week) on the traditional Belgian brewers of Hof ten Dormaal:

Since its founding in 2009, Hof ten Dormaal—located on a 12th-century farm in the village of Tildonk, deep in rural Flanders—has charted its own stubborn course and defied expectations. It’s not just that unusual founding story that defines it. The brewery’s perspective is informed by its owners’ strong opinions about what it means to make and sell “farmhouse” beer, and the beer they produce reflects their characters as well as their struggles.

First, however, a little tidying up with noting Ed posted his Golden Pints with a special nod to his final category for I suppose three distinct reasons:

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer: Sadly the decline of twitter is continuing but I think Jessica Mason has been best for news this year so @drinksmaven

And, speaking of tidying up afterwards, The New York Times posted a piece on the history of the word “toast” in the drinking sense:

The word came to us through the Middle English “tosten” in the 12th century. The noun, meaning bread that had been browned with heat, and the verb, “to brown bread,” may have derived from the Old French toster, “to roast or grill,” or the Latin torrere, “to burn”… But in the Middle Ages, toast was used to flavor a drink… the practice of “toasting” someone stemmed from the days when people would put “pieces of spiced toast into your mead or your wine.” Toasting a person, he said, is like “putting their name in your glass,” as if they add spice or sweetness.

And Martin posted his awards for the best experiences and the best pubs of 2023 including this transporting revelation:

The rail companies are my Villains of the Year. Which is a shame, as I’ve used rail a lot this year, as relentlessly slogging up and down the A1 to see parents has taken its toll on my desire to drive much at all after taking the campervan round the UK to complete the Guide last year. I wondered if I’d get a bit bored of this blog after finishing the GBG, but it started as a travel diary and I still love the writing, and your comments, and the views from (nearly) all over the globe. 813 posts this year, scarily that’s 3 less than 2022.

So… unless I have missed anything else that is soooooo last year… what is the story of 2024 for the perspective of all we all standing here in week one? First, Matthew shared his thoughts for the newsletter of homebrey supply shop Get ‘Er Brewed including this theme I’d be rooting for personally – a Belgian beer revival:

Purists may argue that these sorts of beers haven’t gone anywhere, and they’re probably right. But I don’t think the excitement around Belgian beer is what it was five or ten years ago. In my early days as a beer blogger, I’d enthusiastically take trips to Brussels and Bruges, merrily sipping away on strong beers inside the country’s famous brown cafés. I don’t quite have that same spark at the moment. Although, the other week I got myself a bottle of Oerbier from De Dolle brewery, and thought to myself “I need to start drinking more of this again.”

And Eoghan Walsh shared some thoughts actually from Belgium as well:

A crunch looks to be coming, and soon. It’s not a radical prediction to suggest that some of the first places to go will be the zombie businesses – those that have survived the post-pandemic recovery in a sort of a limbo with their base motor functions intact but without much prospect of a meaningful revival. In 2024, expect the definitive blow to arrive for more of these kinds of bars of cafés. For some of these, time was already called in 2023. The Old Hack, in Brussels’ European quarter, was one such zombie put out of its misery for good.

Sweet anecdotes about needy Nigel Farag hovering included! And Richard Preiss of Escarpment Labratories, perhaps a bit of a cheat given his access to commercial orders and in house R+D, presented his own set of predictions including one that fully deserves the label – “rent beer”:

The idea here is to ensure that your brewery’s lineup has a “rent beer”, a beer that helps pay the rent bill (or mortgage, or glycol chiller maintenance bill). It might not be the top seller, but it’s beer you can produce and sell in volume, with low production costs. This means it shouldn’t be aggressively full of hops or malt, shouldn’t take 10 weeks to ferment and condition, and shouldn’t require any excessively complex processing methods. Luckily, a lot of styles fit into this mold. And luckily, there’s probably not a “go to” option in your local market for all of these styles, so you can carve out a new niche.

Next, WineEnthusiast finally broke with what I had long presumed was largely a dour Scots Presbyterian base with this prediction:

Saturdays traditionally have accounted for 28% of the total weekly value in the market. However, Fridays, Saturdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are all losing their share to Sundays. In other words, more people work from home on Fridays and Mondays, returning to the office during the middle of the week. “People seem to be more inclined to enjoy themselves on Sundays—perhaps because they don’t have to worry about work the next day…”

And Michigan business writer Abby Poirier nibbled around the idea that chasing the tail of a new flavour every week is no longer going to be enough:

And finally the Tand has forecast something very exciting for the next 12 months – more Tand!

The blog will certainly be back a little more often, and I’ll be returning to short sharp posts like I used to. I’ve been reading a lot of my previous stuff, and you know, it isn’t that bad. I recommend particularly my stuff on Sam Smiths, and I’ll be resuming my trek round the ones here and those I visit in London. I’ll also tackle the issue of what might be called “opening hours deficit”. I note quite a few pubs here, have simply closed for parts of January, and while understandable, it isn’t really a healthy sign.

Is any of that going to happen? Some of it will… some won’t… but none of it not one bit of it is going to happen if you all take January off from your boozing!!! Dryuary or whatever it is called is reliably the biggest threat to the world of beer again this first week of the year. Aspects of post holiday season return to common sense sobriety include: (i) CAMRA asking “charities running challenges or fundraising: please ensure your messaging doesn’t encourage people to avoid pubs and social clubs altogether” because it is not “responsible or evidence-based“, (ii) Mudgie proclaming “it’s a deliberate, calculated attack on the pub trade“, (iii) from the Irish Independent: “I don’t know anyone planning to drink more in 2024 than they did in 2023” with “planning” doing a lot of lifting there, (iv) And on Twex “Not January! It’s dark and cold and this is when we NEED alcohol!” which is probably the most honest response. Always the voice or reason – or close enough to one for jazz – Jeff suggests an alternative:

Make this month #PubJanuary. Stop in for a quiet pint, grab dinner out, spend the afternoon playing a board game. It doesn’t really matter what you do—you don’t even have to drink alcohol—but if people kept up their July pace of pub-going, it would make a big difference. We’re not talking the salt mines, either; going out is fun! Consider it a vacation in an evening. In fact, January is typically the deadest time of the year—a perfect opportunity to connect with friends. Enjoying other humans is good for your soul.

Perhaps indicating that there might be another reasons for the problems breweries may be facing, venerable Mid-Atlantic craft brewer Flying Fish seems to be going under weighed down by an incredible level of debt compared to the value of its assets:

Flying Fish Brewing Co., a Pennsylvania brewery that operates in South Jersey, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after a deal fell apart that would have seen the company sold to Cape May Brewing Co. Flying Fish “listed $1.3 million in assets and $9.3 million in liabilities in its Chapter 11 petition, which was filed in late December in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New Jersey. The company is owned by Elk Lake Capital, a capital investment firm in Scranton that acquired Flying Fish in 2016,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Wow. Now that is an assets to liability ratio! Never one for the liable, the award for the first best bit of beer writing of 2024* goes to Katie Mather in Pellicle:

Clouds hang low in the grey of March midweek, obscuring the peaks of New Mills’ surrounding cloughs when we arrive. Through a hollow of rich black soil and slippery rocks is a barely-contained river, pouring its peat-bronzed waters white over weirs, down past the Victorian mills that gave this town its name. Across this gully is where the monsters of Torrside dwell, by the still channels of the canal marina, restless and glimmering in the gloom. The owners of Torrside—a brewery founded here in Derbyshire’s High Peak in 2015—are also its brewers, a team of best friends and their partners. .

From our overseas desk, we learn from Uganda that one form of traditional beer is under threat:

At least once a week, Girino Ndyanabo’s family converges around a pit in which bananas have been left to ripen. The bananas are peeled and thrown into a wooden vat carved like a boat, and the patriarch steps in with bare feet. The sweet juice he presses out is filtered and sprinkled with grains of sorghum, which converts the juice into ethanol, and left to ferment for up to a day. The result is a beverage Ugandans call tonto, or tontomera, a word in the Luganda language that alludes to drinkers’ poor coordination… But its production is under threat as cheap bottled beer becomes more attractive to drinkers and as authorities move to curb the production of what are considered illicit home brews, which have the risk of sometimes deadly contamination. And because tonto production takes place outside official purview, authorities are unable to collect revenue from its sale.

Errr… drinking like Mummy and Daddy is exactly what the pub manager said it is – whether you care or not is another question:

Dr Renée Hoenderkamp, the television doctor, was dining in the restaurant at the Old Bull & Bush in Hampstead, north London, on New Year’s Eve with her husband and daughter when she made a request for all three of them to clink their glasses. She and her husband were drinking wine in champagne glasses, so they asked a waiter for apple juice to be served in one too so their daughter could join in the celebrations at around 7pm. But Dr Hoenderkamp, an NHS doctor who hosts a show on TalkTV, says that a manager at the gastropub told her “it could encourage her to drink alcohol and it’s not a great look” and served it in a tumbler instead.

Of course giving a kid something in a wine glass is mimicking wine drinking. Me, I actually thought the parents should have then ordered Manhattans and let that kid something something in a similar tumbler, too.

There. I said it. Time to get real. Get a move on. The darkest month of the year are now past us. Yes, the days are already really getting longer. And remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (up three to 104) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (910 – down another one) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,430 – one more week with a gain!) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (creeping – literally – up to 165), with sorta unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. All in all I now have to admit my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat and accept that BlueSky is the place in “the race to replace.” Even so and all in all, it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins but here are a few of the folk there perhaps only waiting to discuss beer:

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

*Perhaps it would be more of a contest had GBH not apparently taken all those weeks off (and still not updating the home page from the Signifiers of 2022 by January 3, 2024 even though the 2023 version was posted over ten days ago.)

The Fabulously Miraculously Perhaps Even Mailed-In Final Beery News Notes Of 2023

What can I say? It’s been quiet. Not sure there’s even going to be enough in the news for a proper update. Me, I didn’t even have one drink on Christmas Day… but only because the celebration falling on a Monday means we have Christmas Eve, Tibb’s Eve and a Friday night after the end of work to get through first. Don’t worry. I was sensible. Not like you lot, I suppose. Or perhaps just like you. I can never tell anymore. I’m a bit tired at this point, bracing for the final two or three events before I can get into the seed catelogues properly. I feel a bit like the inadvertantly hilarious AI generated Santa right there. See, someone did a Santa from every province and the original Nova Scotia Santa was clearly a screw up as instead of being cheery like the rest it looks like the guy hired by Mr. Lahey from Trailer Park Boys for a drunk Xmas party. It was quickly swapped out for something more downtown trade association… aka boring… because… Canada…

Speaking of surprises, Boak and Bailey pulled a surprise – after saying they were taking the rest of the year off but then sending out beer links by newsletter. They even sent me a hello in the fine print.* Cheery them!

Apparently it’s hard to break this habit, especially when this is a quiet time of year for many people, prompting interesting blog posts to emerge. So, just for you – and thank you once again for Patrooning us – here are a few links worth checking out.

They also posted their Golden Pints Awards, which was sort of a bigger thing a few years ago back when – and an excellent thing it was too – when people shared their favourites in any number of categories which fitted their personal experiences for the year. I last did them in 2018 and 2021 which means back when was not so so far back, I suppose. Here’s one for this year by an Australian podcast, too. It’s early as yet so you have until Monday to post your thoughts. Anyway, I did like this observation of theirs which captures the mood one aspires to in such things:

On one occasion we arrived shortly after someone had vomited everywhere leading to an immediate clear out of the premises. The Blitz spirit overtook those who remained. Then a mouse appeared and, high on floor cleaner, began to run in circles around the middle of the pub. On another occasion snooker player and DJ Steve Davis was sitting at the bar. Well, fair enough. And then there was the time someone asked the barman for a saw, hammer and nails and, between pints, made a wheelchair ramp out of a sheet of MDF.

And Alistair announced his beer of the year and it was perhaps less of a surprise given he had worked out three finalists but I do admire his standard for selection:

Choosing a single winner from these three beers is, as it seems to be every year, difficult, as were any one of them a permanent feature of drinking central VA, I would likely drink it an awful lot. However, only one of them could actually claim to have been drunk fairly regularly this year, and so the Fuggled Beer of the Year is…Tabolcloth Vollbier from both Selvedge Brewing and Tabol Brewing. It was simply wonderful, and I hope it makes a comeback when Selvedge open up in their new venue in the new year.

Good. Given all of the beers of the year you read about in most periodicals are frankly just rookie of the year awards, I am rooting for Alistair’s wish that it becomes a regular feature. I wonder how the whole “rookie of the year” as champion thing has led to the novelty obsession which has, you know, let to the superficiality and amnesia.

There’s more! Pellicle posted its top ten stories of 2023 and DC Beer had an extended year end feature on the US Capital scene with many of those involved sharing their thoughts – including this comment from the Brandings of Wheatfield that caught attention:

Moving beyond style guidelines written for another time and place continues its positive momentum. The best is yet to come for truly local beer, wherever your local is. We’re seeing progress experimenting with ingredients from here and methods responsive to them. Local beers will be different than predecessors from afar – even if they share a similar style name – and that’s something to celebrate.

Is that a call for chaos or a call for honesty? Speaking of which, The Beer Nut has wrapped up his series on the 12 top Irish brewers of 2023 with a post on those he ranked 13th to 24th including one making a coffee blonde pale ale that illustrates his excellence in matters reportage:

I’ve never seen the like. It is more or less blonde, with a polished-copper pink tint. The pour seemed a little flat, only reluctantly forming a head and offering no more than a gentle sparkle. There’s an aroma of coffee of a certain kind; a cold pouch of ground beans, with nothing warm or inviting about it. In the flavour it’s predominantly a pale ale: they didn’t go too far away with those hops and there’s quite an old-school American, or even English, tang of earthiness, which tastes like Cascade to me, even though there’s Strata and Amarillo in here as well. I couldn’t taste any of their fruitiness. The coffee is surprisingly complementary to this, again not heavy on the roast, or concentrated or oily; little more than a seasoning, in fact, adding a different sort of dryness to an already quite dry base beer. At only 5.1% ABV there’s not a lot of complexity on offer, and while it’s no revelatory taste experience, the experiment does work, giving you something interesting and worthwhile for your trouble.

And The Mudge himself shared his set of year end thoughts in a two parter including these considerations on one beneficial regulatory change affecting the UK brewing trade:

While one might object to the absolute level of duties, the general principle must be correct. It’s rare to see government carrying out a root-and-branch reform of anything nowadays, rather than merely tinkering around the edges… A significant aspect of these changes was to raise the threshold for a lower rate of beer duty from 2.8% ABV to 3.4%, a level at which it is much easier to brew palatable beers. As I reported earlier this month, there has been significant movement to reduce the strength of beers a little above this level, although it remains distinctly patchy, and the jury is still out on to what extent drinkers will be happy to accept lower-strength beers. The duty savings are so significant, though – over 50% – that the 3.4% category is only going to grow in future.

That’s new analysis right there. Jeff came out with a surprisingly hopeful year ender on the state of beer writing but two cheers for the optimism after this summary at the outset which I share at some length:

Here at the end of the year, a number of folks have been taking stock of their various writing ventures. Three I noted were Boak and Bailey, Courtney Iseman, and the duo behind the recently-launched Taster Tray (Kendall Jones and Adam Robbings), who summed up the mood of the three this way:

“In other ways, the kind of stuff we reported (over and over again) told us that maybe it was a bit irrelevant in today’s craft beer world, where more people than ever drink craft beer but fewer people harbor a deep, hobby-like passion for it. More consumers, less enthusiasts.”

These sentiments get at a reality deeper than just the fortunes of individual writers (or writing teams). It has been hard to make a living as a journalist/writer for—well, forever, but certainly in the cheap-content internet age. But something else is happening as well. As beer goes through the transition I described on Wednesday, everything it touches is transitioning, too. In the case of journalism, two trends in particular made things hard in 2023: people are less curious and engaged about beer (and that means everything from homebrewing to tasting to history and travel to business) at the same time that there is so much already available out there for the interested reader.

I think that last bit is key. For while it is truly amazing how many beer writers (especially those scrambling doing it for meagre pay) do not have a good look at what has already been written about a topic before jumping in (so therefore make some glowing gaffs) the sheer wonder that are these internets is that it is auto-archiving and auto-indexing. Yes, there is still a huge amount of researching and writing to be done but it is being done on the collective shoulders of others whether those standing up there admit it or not! It’s all a collective tree of knowledge. So be a twig! And have aspirations to be a bit of a branch even. I mean, look at Gary. Four posts on the “beer jacket” trend of the first half of the 1900s. Who’s not interested in that sort of digging? Well, paying periodicals for sure… but are you interested in writing or interested in eating? Hmm???

And it’s good to acknowledge that all this re-examination of what we beer scribblers are to do with our brief alloted span on this planet as we stare at our keyboards** is all happening in a contraction rather than a transition, during an overall drop in interest in beer. Business Insider has dubbed this the worst year in beer in a quarter century. With good cause as the always reliable New York Post explains:

Sales declined by more than 5% in the first nine months of the year, dragged down not only by the backlash and boycotts against Anheuser-Busch-owned Bud Light but the changing habits of younger drinkers, according to Beer Marketer’s Insights. Overall beer sales have also been hit as millennials and Gen-Zers ditch the brews for other alcohol-infused products like canned cocktails or simply drink less than previous generations. Sales of craft beer, which emerged as a huge growth engine in the late ’90s, have also been down for three of the past four years, according to Steinmann. “This is an industry-wide, five-alarm fire,” Craig Purser, president of the National Beer Wholesalers Association, said in a speech to wholesalers at a convention in October, according to the Wall Street Journal report.

AKA: “fewer consumers, less enthusiasts.“Yikes! Is it too late to start collecting stamps? I could be a stamp expert. Maybe… One thing I can admit is that I like about Cider Review is how it is much more focused on the beverage as agriculture than you see in the beer press – with good reason. I grew up in a world of ag commodity prices and the weather on the zones of the Grand Banks being regularly reported on the radio and TV. So happy was I to see their year end review was as much about the crop than anything:

As we conclude our collective summary of Harvest 2023 here on Cider Review, Hogmanay is fast approaching; the weeks of Wassail just around the corner, followed by the pruning cycle for slumbering fruit trees bathing in their Winter chill hours. It’s as beautiful a time of year in the orchard as any – if you can, do go for an explore in one mid-morning, with a strong hoar frost settled over the skeletal branches of Dabinett and Stoke Red, Porter’s Perfection and Ellis Bitter. You won’t be disappointed. Onto then, the final batch of producers who have very generously taken the time out of their harvest schedule (now mostly finished I do hope) to answer our questions here on Cider Review.

Speaking of ag, The Greenock Telegraph, the newspaper of record in the family’s seat in the old country, has certainly been paying attention and shared some odd Scots law including one related to a coo:

Based on the Licencing Act of 1872, it is an offence to be drunk while in charge of a cow, horse, carriage or steam engine or while possessing a loaded firearm. Those found guilty of this weird ‘Victorian DUI’ law could be jailed for up to 51 weeks.

Govern yourselves accordingly! And with even more ag, Jamie Goode, wine writer, shared some thoughts via Twex on the oddities he has noticed in the marketplace for the grape including this observation:

At the bottom end wine is unsustainably cheap and prices need to rise so everyone can make a living and farmers can do what we ask of them when we insist on sustainability for example I don’t like glyphosate but you are naive if you call for a ban because it costs more to farm without it, so we need to make cheap wine more profitable…

That makes sense. And sort of the opposite of craft beer. Additive and adjunct free should come at a premium. But what really shouldn’t come at a great premium is Belgian beer glass collecting as The Brussels Times reports.

The Duvel glass collecting hobby, once pursued for enjoyment, has evolved into a potentially dangerous realm, with Vanhoeck expressing his concerns about the escalating intensity and financial toll it takes on some enthusiasts. While some collectors are driven by passion and nostalgia, others see it as an opportunity to fund major life events, such as buying a home. Even the designers, like Hedof, grapple with ethical dilemmas as the value of their creations skyrockets, balancing principles with financial realities.

Turning to a starker reality and in a follow up of sorts to an article from a few years back in GBH on Taybeh Brewing located in one of the West Bank’s few remaining Christian villages, The Guardian examines the situation the brewery now finds itself in during a time of war:

The brewery has not been able to obtain export permits needed for international shipping through Israeli ports, and several of Khoury’s employees have been injured in attacks by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. “We’re also just filled with grief – and even fear,” says Khoury, who has family in Gaza. She is determined to keep going, however, hoping for a more peaceful future. “To build our state and economy, we have to invest our knowledge and money,” she says. “And that’s exactly what my family and I are doing. Our brewery is not just about great beer, but about the image of Palestine – one of the most liberal Arab countries. That’s one of the messages I’d like to share with the world.”

Now and finally for 2023… looking forward… The New York Times got the jump on Dryanuary… or is it JanDulluary?… with a exeedingly sensible article on how to go about it.

There is no data suggesting that those folks won’t be able to abstain from drinking, said Dr. David Wolinsky, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences with Johns Hopkins Medicine, who specializes in addiction. But starting the month with a few strategies in your back pocket — and with a clear sense of your goals — may help you get the most out of the challenge. “Most of the benefits of Dry January are probably going to be related to the intention with which you go into Dry January,” Dr. Wolinsky said. The challenge isn’t a stand-in for treatment for people with alcohol use disorder, he stressed, but those who are looking to get a fresh start to the year may benefit from the mental and physical reset it can offer, and the opportunity to adopt new habits.

I’m all for that. I track everything every day now and have for a few years – fasting hours, drink downed, exercise done, books read, chores chored. Pandemic habit I suppose but it works. So I don’t necessarily think I am going to do a dry month. For the curious, here’s where I was after 2021 and 2022 and here is a summary of 2023 as we near the end of the final month. I’m quite pleased with it all. I have moved roughly speaking from around 1.95 drinks a day to around 1.8 without any sort of inconvenience. That adds up to maybe 50 less over the whole year. Who misses one a week? No one. I’ll probably aim for a similar drop in 2024 but it is all in the sensible range. Remember: however you do you – make sure you pay a bit of attention.

There. There was enough out there worth getting all linky over. Things are looking up. And you should, too! The darkest two weeks of the year are now past us. Yes, the days are already getting longer. And remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (up three to 101) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (911 – down one) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,429 – another week with a gain!) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (creeping – literally – up to 164), with unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. All in all I now have to admit my dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat and accept that BlueSky is the place in “the race to replace.” Even so and all in all, it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins but here are a few of the folk there perhaps only waiting to discuss beer:

*And a Happy New Year to you!
**OK, that’s a bit too close even for me!

Surely Your Bestest Christmas Present Ever… These Cheery Beery News Notes

So, here we are. We have slipped into Yule itself, the semi-conscious days of the competing forces of the sugar highs, the alcohol buzz and the tryptophan doze. And napping. I recommend you start with the 3 pm nap. That nap rewards you for putting in 3/4s of a day’s effort and sets you up for pre-dinner cocktails. One of the classic naps. Very relaxing. Sorta like the mood in this week’s front page above the fold photo right there. That picture, by the way, is the Yuletide beery photo contest winner for 2010, perhaps the apex of the madness of submissions every December back then. It was submitted by Brian Stechschulte of San Francisco and was declared Grand Champion. It was called that for no other reason than there were also twelve other separate prize packs awarded that year. Crazy.

First up? What’s that you say: “what’s the news on Japaneses two-row barley breeding?” Well… funny you should ask:

“This study detected key traces of Japanese barley improvement inscribed in the genomes of two high-quality modern cultivars. Japanese beer barley breeding began around 150 years ago by introducing Western high-quality beer barley. The hot and humid Japanese climate and soil-transmitting virus diseases hampered the development of beer barley suited for Japan. Western beer barley cultivars inevitably required crossed with virus-disease-resistant East Asian barley, despite the latter having undesirable brewing quality characteristics. Balancing virus disease resistance and malting quality was extremely difficult.”

Interesting. I also struggle to balance resistance and quality… as you know. Also interesting is how this time last week, I told you about a piece in The Times of London on how to survive and even enjoy the UK version of the Christmas office party. This week in The New York Times (no relation) there was something of a companion piece but one with a very different outlook:

DoorDash, which cut about 1,250 employees at the end of last year, is hosting happy hours in regional offices — many of them starting early, like 4:30 p.m. in San Francisco — as well as “WeDash” meet-ups where employees can compete for prizes like a Vespa scooter. CNBC did a low-key morning celebration in New Jersey, with mimosas, as well as an afternoon party, accommodating employees who work different shifts. TIAA, the investment firm, did on-site holiday celebrations from 4 to 7 p.m. called “Gratitude Gatherings… “When you’re doing an event to inspire people, motivate them and reward them, do it on terms they’d appreciate. Even me personally, I want to get home earlier…”

ZZZzzzz… the article even used the word “wholesome” in a positive sense! Wholesome!!! I hope any Brits reading this are having a good belly laugh. There, the verdict is in: UK pub sales up over 7% compared to Yule2022 – and no doubt up 92,919,845% compared to some sort of wholesome late afternoon gatherings. Conversely, you can check in with Ron who has been sending dispatches from a proper holiday with Dolores in Britain, with three posts with three pictures of three breakfasts and a trip to the Museum on their last day there featuring this fabulous exchange:

Bags packed and dumped, we head to the British Museum. We spend an hour or two there each trip. Concentrating on one section. We’ve still lots left to see. This time, it’s Dark Ages and medieval Europe. There’s quite a queue for the security checks. A jangle of Chinese girlies in front of us are taking selfies. Lots of selfies. “I wonder what they do with them all?” I ask Dolores. “The same as you do with all your boring pub photos. Nothing.” “They’re for my blog.” “Right. Nothing to do with your weird building obsession.” “That’s not true.” “Then why do your photos never have people in them?” “They do sometimes.” “Only by accident.”

And Ruvani has a story out on an interesting new IPA – an actual interesting one! – from brothers Van and Sumit Sharma who developed it with Alan Pugsley, British brewmaster and founder of Shipyard Brewing in Portland, Maine as well as disciple of the late Peter Austin who we lost recently:

In creating their own IPA, the Sharmas and Pugsley decided to brew what they consider to be a “British-Indian IPA,” stylistically modeled on more traditional English IPAs, acknowledging the style’s history, while maintaining Rupee’s ethos of making high quality easy-drinking beer meant for food pairing. “Rupee IPA is brewed in the traditions of classic English IPAs, enhancing malt and hop balance—creating a drinkable beer with a dry crisp hop bitterness balanced with subtle maltiness,” says Sharma. He emphasizes that the beer’s copper color and bright clarity mean it is far removed from American West Coast and New England IPA styles.

Yum. I mean I expect it’s yum. Confession: I like Pugsley beers. I sleep in t-shirts covered in Pugsley brewed beer brand logos. But also a “Blueberries for Sal” one, too. So there. Napwear.

Note: NHS Martin encounters the perfect perhaps prototyical proper pub… possibly. Not at all related, an inproper pint has been punished:

An ice lolly-themed beer has been discontinued after a boy saw his dad drinking it and burst into tears because he wasn’t allowed to try it. The four-year-old’s mother complained about Rocket Lolly IPA to alcohol industry trade body the Portman Group, which agreed that the ale appealed to children. Portman Group upheld the mum’s complaint and brewery Northern Monk agreed to discontinue the beer. The mother, who is unnamed in the report, said: “We raised our four-year-old to understand what alcohol is and why he is not permitted to try it.”

Quite right, too, though I would have thought the prohibition on really stupid branding would have applied, too, and not just the crying toddler rule.

Alistair, my lower mid-table nemisis in the Pellicle EPL pool, has found plenty to not cry about but instead to praise in his annual review of his favourite beers of the year, starting with the pale ones:

Ah…the first day of two weeks of Yuletide holiday. Time to make mince pies, plan menus for the various festive days, and to wonder if I even bother buying beer given the amount of cider in the alcohol fridges. It is also time for the annual review of the year, which thanks to having managed to get out of the country a couple of times will include both a drinking den and a brewery of the year. As ever though, we start with pale beers, those that are yellow or golden, without veering too much into orange.

Not one to be caught napping, Matt is also pushing back against the current gloom with some longer term thinking, gazing towards the end of the decade and seeing some light at the end of the tunnel shining in the form of investments:

But with the industry facing such difficult trading conditions that will likely continue into 2024 and beyond, why invest in such a large chunk of the hospitality industry now? Surely this is a time for caution, not confidence. Investors are a savvy bunch though, and firms like Breal will be intentionally investing in projects it believes will provide them with a profitable return, usually within five to seven years… While Breal’s moves could be framed as blind optimism, I posit that there’s a good deal more logic to it than that. It likely means that, by 2028 and beyond, the investor expects the beer and hospitality markets to be in a far better position to trade profitably.

Buy low. Sell high. Makes sense. And this is the low, right? Right? Hard to tell what is what these days. For example at the end of last week, one report in The Drinks Business received some comment over its overly enthusiastic characterization of the tiny THC laced bevvy trade:

Phil McFarland, Wherehouse Beverage Company’s general manager of THC Beverages and who worked at Half Acre Beer, told Axios that the move reminded him of what happened with craft beer. McFarland said coming “through the craft beer wave, this feels very familiar to me. In five years or so, this is going to be as pervasive and accepted as craft beer has become.”

Mirella was not convinced by such plain puffery but Dan put a finger on one thing: “Only if you consider a growing variety of fruity drinks equivalent to the craft beer wave!” Given that the craft beer trade, embracing the slippery slopes in its despiration, over the last few years has allowed the debasement of its brand along with its products, Dan may well have a point. Except even with that level of meaninglessness… it ain’t happening either. Confess! Do any of you actually drink that stuff? Not just taste it once or twice at trade shows booths but actually repeatedly buy it?

Note: the Badger. Govern yourselves accordingly!

Speaking of which… hmm… ever wonder about the availability of light beer in North Korea? Me neither. So…

Rowan Beard, a tour manager of Young Pioneer Tours, anticipated that the new beverage could be a success. “There is an outspoken demand for a beer that can avoid men putting on weight in North Korea,” he told NK News. Beard explained that many North Koreans drink soju not only because it’s cheaper but because many want to “avoid putting on unnecessary weight caused by beer. I can see this beer selling well if they’re able to price it the same or cheaper than the current beers available in the country,” he said, as many will want beer “without the guilt.”

Bet there’s plenty of “unspoken demand”… if you know what I mean. And there are beer tours! Which means now you can go where people are one, now you can go where they get things done.

Q: is the Bud Lite botch and backlash really over? Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps relatedly, Jessica Mason reports that ABInBevBudCo faces a new problem

The union told Fox Business that out of 5,000 members who work at 12 AB InBev breweries in the US, 99% voted to authorise a strike. This means that if the workers cannot secure a new labour contract raising wages, protecting jobs and securing benefits before the union’s contract expires on 29 February 2024, then strikes will take place and beer production will likely become affected. Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien said: “Teamsters stand firm in our fight for the best contract at Anheuser-Busch, and this powerful strike vote proves it. Our members’ labour, talent, and sacrifice are what put Anheuser-Busch products on the shelf, and we are committed to getting a contract that rewards and recognises their hard work.”

Solidarity!! Fight the power!!! It is a time of endings. Many sorts of endings as Boak and Bailey* have carried through with their long promised exit from Twex. I might just keep linking to their roundups for a while as a public service but, then again, there’s this sort of weird comment when helpfully directed where to find them…

Yes, it’s goodbye to B&B from me as well as I don’t follow any other platforms either – and have no plans to do so.

[BREAKING: man starves due to fork being placed on left side of bowl, not on the right.] They explained the move in their newsletter… which is a little like dancing about architecture but never mind:

We got to dislike feeling tethered to a particular platform. Feeling as if we couldn’t leave irritated us. It’s also been unstable and chaotic for a year or more, with sudden changes in functionality and policy. That made us anxious. It also turns out that starting from scratch on other platforms comes with benefits. We’ve got far fewer followers on Mastodon, BlueSky, and Instagram, but they seem more engaged.

In another serious sort of loss, venerable Canadian industry watcher Greg Clow has announced the winding up of his 15 year run as editor-in-chief and bottle washer at Canadian Beer News, a ticker tape of sorts that provided updates on every announcement in the national scene:

After 15 years and more than 17,000 articles, I’ve decided that it’s time to bring Canadian Beer News to an end, meaning this year’s hiatus will be permanent. On one hand, this wasn’t an easy decision. I still enjoy spreading the word about brewery openings, beer releases, festivals and events, and other developments in Canada’s beer and brewing industry. But on the other hand, I’m also pretty damn tired of it.

Thanks, praise and some sadness ensued but this admission from Greg put things pretty clearly into focus: “…honestly, the idea of having to report on so many closures, and the loss of so many people’s livelihoods, just isn’t appealing to me…” Greg promises that he just might revive his blog Beer Boose & Bites after a 12 year snack break.

And Stan has also signed off… but just for the rest of the year.** In addition to his excellent linky selection, this week he explored the state of the industry and shared this message to and from the trade:

A “Year in Beer” summary produced by the Brewers Association and chief economist Bart Watson’s presentation last week for association members and the press both focused on the business of beer. They made it clear that the numbers reflect an ongoing trend, and that 2024 will be just as challenging for breweries. Why should beer drinkers care? For one thing, if your favorite brewery goes out of business you’ve lost something. So consider Watson’s last two slides. He suggested that “most of the challenges craft faces have opportunities in craft strengths.” Flavor and variety matter, a wide range (including next to zero) ABVs serve different occasions well, and where diversity grows niche and local opportunities do as well.

What kills me about these sorts of trade messages Stan shares right there is how they are too often affirmations of what the trade is already doing! Plus everything is a plus. With that lack of critical consideration, I expect 2024 to be worse than 2023. And you see something of a similar analytical gap in those interviewed for a piece by Kate Bernot in GBH on the state of homebrewing that on, one hand wants, to convince the reader that there is hope for the hobby while, at the same time, pretty much identifying that interest has seriously faded – and that there’s good reason for that dwindling within the greater slide of craft beer:

…interest in the club declined six to eight years ago as more craft breweries opened in the Birmingham area. As older members of the club have moved away or aged out, fewer new members are replacing them… Ask an existing homebrewer to invite a friend to brew with them, and statistically, that friend is likely to be a white man, too. The Carboy Junkies’ membership reflects this homogeneity: Joines says the club is made up of 80% white males over the age of 35, with the majority of them being older than 50. He says everyone in the club is married; most are affluent; and most have graduate degrees.

Even I, the lasped bad homebrewer, never personally had the need for a club. It was a kitchen to basement thing for me. (Like farm to table but with stairs… sorta.) Well, other than, you know, that club formed by my friends and sudden wave of strange new acquaintances who drank up whatever I made. Then I had kids. Then I, you know, grew up. Or woke up. Was that it?

That is it! Happy holidays!! The days are already getting longer. And remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (98) rising up to maybe… probably… likely pass Mastodon (912) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,427 – I actually gained one!) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (163), with unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. All in all I now have a bit of dispair for Mastodon in terms of beer chat and accept that BlueSky is catching up in “the race to replace.” Even so and although it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing or perhaps only waiting to discuss beer:

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

*Check out their best beer writing of 2023 post, too. I won’t be doing one. I live in the now, baby.
**Man, no wonder they set up the beer roundup writers’ holiday party for next week… oh well, more of the cheese ball for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As The Madcap Slide Into Yuletide Speeds Up Here’s This Week’s Beery News

I am already late. I think that is what Yule really means: “you are late!” I need to still get a few things together… very few… but I already feel rushed. Perhaps this is how “We Three Kings” felt galloping across the Middle East and it’s all part of the lessons of the season. Fretting. I dunno. I need a few of these Caribbean Christmas drinks. No wonder people take winter vacations. To make up for the Christmas vacation. Not as rushed as the holiday-time photo contest kept me a decade ago. That’s the winner from 2012 up there by Robert Gale, one of 36 photo entries I posted on just one day in that long contest period. That was a lot of fun – but nuts, too.

First up, Stan is back and posted his linkfest on Monday after a month on the hollyjollydays – and he noticed something:

Has it really been four weeks since I posted links here? Indeed, and it seems as if it would be easy to sort through the headlines since Nov. 6 and assemble a post of only stories about the craft beer apocalypse. I am left searching for a phrase that is the opposite of “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Perhaps “Five Feet And Rising“? Just to, you know, keep up with an aquatic theme? Stan explores some of the reasons for the craft beer predicament so go have a look. Even though the exploration and examination of a downturn is valuable and in craft almost fully ignored… I know the feeling but have promised myself to be cheerier this week. I will. It is the holidays or perhaps just the pre-holidays after all. Let’s see if that’s possible.

But first… Jordan has been worked a few paper rolls through the adding machine and come up with for Ontario what can only be called findings:

Will update the map later, but it looks to me like we’re down from 413 physically operated brewery locations to 389 so far this year. There are some ownership situations I don’t know how to express simply in geographic format. Assume that number is high… If you condense ownership structures, we can reduce 67 locations to 27 companies. So… 349 companies total.

Maybe related: low alcohol partying and no alcohol bars? Apparently Sam Smiths is also running no alcohol bars, given that “as many as 120 Smith’s pubs are currently closed“! That’s what’s said in that article in The Times about the Samuel Smith’s of Yorkshire. Not so much about the brewery as the man running the operation. This was a brutal passage:

Back in the 1990s Samuel Smith’s bought and began pouring millions of pounds into restoring the town’s derelict Old Vicarage, which dates back to the 14th century. Great care was taken to go above and beyond rules stipulated by English Heritage… When the eight-year project was complete, the vicar at the nearby St Mary’s Church was informed that her new house was ready. The offer came like a bolt from the heavens. St Mary’s vicar already had a home — one she liked and better suited the needs of her young family. After the invitation was politely declined, the lavishly restored building was locked up.

Enough. It’s the holidays. Here’s some good news. The BBC reports that Welsh brewery Brains has turned its fortunes around… literally… or is it figuratively…:

The company had debts of £76.4m, most of which had accumulated before the pandemic. Mr Bridge worked with a number of banks to restructure and agree repayment of all of the debt, with the chief executive finally feeling confident about the company’s financial health by the summer of 2023. “We’ve managed to navigate those challenging times. And it wasn’t just us, it was the whole drinks and hospitality industry that went through those challenges,” Mr Bridge said. Brains is more than beer in Wales. Having been brewing in Cardiff since 1882, the company is still owned by the descendants of Samuel Arthur Brain.

More with the cheery. What is cheery? History is cheery! And international. Heck, we received a comment in German this week, a footnote to my bit on the Lispenard clan, 1700s Loyalist beer barons in New York. Lord Goog provided the translation. Speaking of lore of yore, the Beer Ladies Podcast had a great interview this week with Dr Susan Flavin, a historian joined in a project recreating a 1500s brewery:

In this fascinating project – link below – the team used a recipe based on a beer once served in Dublin Castle, in order to not only taste it, but to learn more about the role beer played in the early modern period. This one will tickle the beer history nerds and casual beer fans alike!

In more recent history, Boak and Bailey have a great explainer this week on the pub feature called a “snob screen” as helpfully illustrated in the 1963 comedy The Punch & Judy Man where they are used as part of a physical joke:

Hancock, who co-wrote the film as well as starring in it, uses these as the basis for a bit of ‘business’ which, handily, you can see some of in the trailer for the film. He pops in and out of the various windows, taunting and teasing the snobs behind the snob screen. In other words, he refuses to respect (literal) social barriers, and highlights their purely symbolic nature. After all, he and his pals can hear almost every word that is being said a few inches from them, on the other side of the screen. What is slightly odd is that most surviving examples of tilting or swivelling snob screens are there to separate customers from bar staff, rather than from each other.

Neato. And a couple of decades later, the BBC took us back to a Belfast board game of forty years ago and posed the question whther it was glorifying or just identifying actual pub culture:

1981: Scene Around Six explored a Belfast pub crawl board game, named Binge. Controversial enough that many shops refused to stock it, it did at least have the backing of a certain local mover and shaker, Mr Terri Hooley.

And another bit of history. In the same week that it is reported that Diageo is ditching most of its beer brands*, a landmark in craft brewing history is being lost with the closure of the Ringwood Brewery in Hampshire, England after fifteen years in someone else’s portfolio.

In 2007, Ringwood was purchased by Marston’s for £19.2 million. Marston’s disposed of its brewing operations in 2020, selling assets to a joint venture with the Carlsberg Group to create the Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company. Mr Davies mentioned that he is “incredibly proud” of the effort and dedication of staff at Ringwood Brewery, adding: “Our priority now is to support colleagues affected by the proposals through the consultation period, which has now begun.”

You know, the official hagiography of craft beer does not properly account for the importance of the Ringwood Brewery which came into being in 1978 led by Peter Austin. As Boak and Bailey discuss in Brew Britannia as well as in their thoughtful obituary for him of almost a decade ago, Austin was one of the few people who could legitimately be called a founder:

His first triumph was building and getting established the Penrhos Brewery on behalf of Martin Griffiths, Terry ‘Python’ Jones and writer Richard Boston. He then launched his own brewery, Ringwood, in 1978, and thereafter came to be the ‘go to’ guy for advice on setting up similar operations. When David Bruce was setting up his first Firkin brewpub in 1979, it was Austin who vetted his designs for a miniature basement brewkit. The two were both founder members of SIBA, which then stood for The Small Independent Brewers Association, and Austin was its first Chair.

Austin also consulted, with Alan Pugsley, brewing bringing his energy into the new brewing movement in North America. I’ve had beers in breweries in Nova Scotia, Maine, New York and Ontario directly carrying on that tradition. The shutting of the Ringwood is the end of an era.

The big news in the world of Pellicle is that I WON the November fitba pool (even though I am wallowing in the nether ranks.) It which was a great surprise that earned me a mug. Oh… yes, and Will Hawkes wrote something well worth reading for Pellicle about London’s pub group Grace Land and the co-owners Andreas Akerlund and Anselm Chatwin:

They met when Anselm took a job as a bar back at Two Floors, Barworks’ bar in Soho, whilst he was at St Martin’s College (now Central St Martins) in the early 2000s. Temperamentally similar and with a shared passion for music, they cooked up a vague plan to open a dive bar/gig venue—and when a site, formerly The Camden Tup, came on the market in 2009 they opened the first Grace Land venue, The Black Heart. It wasn’t an immediate success. “The Black Heart was a dismal failure for many years,” he says. “But it’s about working with the concept, sticking with it. People get it now.” That philosophy has served them well in the years since, during which they’ve slowly accrued a small family of high-quality pubs…

Note: The English are coming back down to pre-Covid levels of alcohol consumption. Is inflation healthy? Hmm… and while we are at it… next time someone suggests that terrior in wine isn’t real, mention this study as reported in The New York Times:

“It’s one of those terms that the wine industry likes to keep a bit mysterious, part of the magic of wine,” said Alex Pouget, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Geneva. Dr. Pouget is trying to apply chemical precision to this je ne sais quoi. In a study published Tuesday in the journal Communications Chemistry, he and his colleagues described a computer model that could pinpoint which Bordeaux estate produced a wine based only on its chemical makeup. The model also predicted the year in which the wine was made, known as its vintage, with about 50 percent accuracy.

That’s some science right there, that is. Continuing with questions of authenticity, again we go with The Times out of London which had an interesting article on tea and chai this week with some very interesting assertions about appropriation and the nature of foodways:

You can culturally appropriate badly, or you can culturally appropriate well, but almost all culture involves appropriation. While Indians have been adding spices to milky beverages for centuries, the spiced tea that is fashionable in American and British coffee shops, and is sometimes marketed as an exotic drink, is no more purely Indian than, say, chillis (which originally came from Central/South America). Indeed, chai is the result of the British imperial push to get Indians to consume tea.

Note: Lars wrote about complexes of closely located language families. Nicely done. Also nicely done, Geoff wrote about Ethiopian borde over on Mastodon, a very complex form of beer making.

I think I first had Jack’s Abbey lager with Ron and Craig in Albany New York back in March 2016. I recall hitting a store on the way back from Delmar. Ah, Delmar! Anyway, Jeff has done an admirable job remembering what he wrote down during his recent visit… before he lost his notes from that visit… including, to begin, its location:

The city proper is small and compact, but the metro area, or Greater Boston, includes around a hundred small towns clustered in the fan stretching out from Boston Harbor. Two radial freeways, I-95 and I-495, mark important distance metrics. Anything inside I-95 is pretty Boston-y, while anything within the larger I-495 ring is Greater Boston. Framingham, home to Jack’s Abby, is 20 miles due west of downtown Boston and about halfway between 95 and 495.

Note: Zak Rotello of the Olympic Tavern of Rockford, Illinois alerted us to this situation: 1, 2, 3, 4. Govern yourselves accordingly.

Nice piece in Cider Review this week on the state of the tiny German perry trade and its advocate in chief, Barry Masterson:

As anyone who follows Barry will know, there are a good number of pear trees in his home region around Schefflenz. He’s previously reported its former significance in Bavaria and until relatively recently it was a central cultural tenet of rural life in the Western Palatinate, a little way west of Barry, near the Rhine and around much of German wine country. But today there’s vanishingly little to be had commercially, and if I didn’t have a direct line to Barry, Lord alone knows how I’d have found anything out about it for the book.

And finally in one of the weirdest craft fibby claims yet, the fact checkers and desk editors of Forbes seems to have taken coffee break when this one crossed by their inboxes:

Recently the Cicerone Certification Program announced that six people had achieved the rank of Master Cicerone. There are now a total of 28 Master Cicerones worldwide. A Master Cicerone is similar to a Master Sommelier in the wine world but the focus is less on service/hospitality and more on general beer knowledge. The exam is frequently billed as one of the hardest tests not just in beer, but in the world.

FFS. Is there any bloatification that craft can’t claim? Safe to say that gaining the certificate does not require passing one of the hardest tests in the world. There are, after all, brain surgeons not to mention standard shift drivers licenses. Not being a peer reviewed academic course, however, allows for this sort of thing to float around.

Fin. We are done. I know I’m done. Remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (94) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (907) in value… then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,426) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (162), with unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon (even if BlueSky is catching up in the race to replace.) And even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing or perhaps only waiting to discuss beer:

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

*Or not… as a web-publication called Just Drinks has asserted that Diageo does not plan to offload beer assets – apparently based on this peak of investigative reporting: a “company spokesperson said: ‘We do not comment on market speculation.’“

The Uncertainty Abounds As Yuletide Looms Edition Of The Beery News Notes

That’s that. Eleven months in the books. Tomorrow? The true Yuletide madness really begins. But before we get all holly jolly, the news in brews this week has not be uplifting. I was surprised last week how much positivity there was. As you will see below, this has not lingered if my reading is to be believed. Except if the British Guild of Beer Writers is to be believed as many of the awards presented last evening were won by familiar friends around these environs: David Jesudason for the treble including best book for sure but also Jessica Mason for business writing as well as Emmie Harrison-West including for communications about diversity and Eoghan Walsh for best self-published plus audio comms as illustrated. I knew them when. Err… read them when. All well deserved. And perhaps better than a silver cup… big congrats to Ruvani de Silva who got her story of the rise of foamy beer published in the lofty pages of the Washington Post:

Foamy beer is a centuries-old European tradition, but in the American market the phenomenon has spread from a nerdy niche to a veritable tidal wave of foam-focused pours across the United States. Increasingly curious drinkers have put bad memories of sticking their fingers into Solo cups at college keg parties behind them and are seeking out the perfect pour, where the presence of beer foam enhances their drinking experience — aided by the arrival of Czech Lukr “side-pour” taps and a new interest in British-style cask engines.

That’s writing for real Bezos bucks, folks. Sweet. Now, remember those successes as we now get back down into the weekly grind. Starting with a question asked by the Morning Advertiser: where have all the pub guides gone… including one published previously by the UK‘s AA Limited, trading as The AA (formerly The Automobile Association)… the people with that nice mod yellow and black logo:

Before you shout “it’s all online now” – it isn’t. People think the AA do everything online but it still produces a book. It’s called The Restaurant Guide and the strapline is written by Janson Atherton, the Michelin-starred chef. So goodbye printed pub guide and hello Michelin man… restaurants ahead of pubs apparently.

The article somewhat confusingly traces the end of the Good Pub Guide which went from being an actual book to an online publication in 2009 and then ceased being updated there in 2021. They also note the loss of the Eating Out in Pubs book which Michelin had put out. Was that one last seen in 2018? Mudgie asks reasonably “is there a decline in the number of people interested in seeking out unfamiliar pubs?” while Matthew noted “I literally had a guide book about pubs published a month a go” as well as:

It also misses the point that the publishing industry has been decimated by both access to free stuff online and inflation making producing high quality print very expensive. This is the toughest I’ve ever known it as a freelancer, I don’t have enough work.

My only quibble is the comment on “free stuff” given paid online came and continues to come from bloggers (even those hiding in those difficult to access newsletters) some of whom decided to get into books and mags starting around 2010-12 and then a few of whom proclaimed themselves “beer experts”, a handful of whom actually are… in specific areas of expertise. We remember that access to audience does not necessarily denote quality in such matters. Consider this sort of made-up cleverness that is less than convincing. We remember too that audience is also no guarantee to reward. Consider now Pete‘s honest sharing this week of the realities of even someone who has voice a voice and topics as well as he has. So the reality is there has only been a living for a few in this area of scribbling. For many it is largely augmented by other income. Most do it for something between love and an itch. What, then, is the “free stuff” in this context I ask… with every sympathy. I do think about that when I read the names of all those shortlisted for last night’s awards.

To make matters even worse, to Matthew’s list I might have also added the sudden wave of crap A.I. generated shit and how (i) it is shit and (ii) how it undermines the expectations of readers, now realizing that some much of the text we encounter is too often A.I. generated shit. Imagine reading this, remembering I used to subscribed to Sports Illustrated. No wonder making a go of it is so hard. [Operative words being, of course, “used to”!] To be fair, I still get The New Yorker and Flagmaster,* international man of mystery that I am, both in physical format. So support those you like if you want to read their writing. And I think about this as well when I read the names of all those shortlisted for last night’s awards.

And yet… and yet… we have to be honest about how layering on that we see the UK bracing for the coming tide of Yule with some sobering… sober… semi-sobered stats out there for the trade, included in this article by James Evison in TDB:

– “the average Brit now drinks… only about 124 pints of beer, which is half the number of 50 years ago“;
– “a third of adults would avoid drinking at Christmas altogether“; and
– “more than half (56%) of 18-34 year olds looking to avoid alcohol over the festive period, compared to a quarter of those aged 55 and over.“

You know, especiallly listening to some blander beer boosting pundits, you would think that something apparently called neo-temperance is to blame and not just a case of folk either finding times tight, wanting to get healthier or finding fun things to do other than getting laced. Like flags, for example. They are fun. Or gardening. Hmm. See, even thought I try to find the uplifting stories for you, I am personally more inclined to sees this all as an overall shift. And a shift towards something else. In Canada as was illustrated neatly by Jason Foster of On Beer who issued some national stats, tracing the plateau and descent that brewing hereabout seems to be experiencing:

…the real story here is the negatives. Nine of 13 jurisdictions report a reduction in the number of breweries per capita (15+). Given that Quebec’s number was previously undereported, there likely isn’t much growth there either. Had I gone with the most recent population data from Q3 of 2023, things would have looked even worse (I didn’t because we can’t get an age breakdown for that dataset). The clear conclusion from this table is that the growth of craft beer has stalled and that with population growth this means the industry is actually starting to fall behind. We are seeing fewer breweries to serve the available market than we did a couple of years ago.

Again with Matthew, he hints at the same thing in the UK, that a reckoning is coming: “speaking to a lot of breweries, so many are up against the wire, even those who may appear on the surface to be thriving, behind the scenes it’s a different picture” so expect to see more exits in early 2024.** While entirely embracing the excellence of folk like Katie at The Glug,*** please ignore some of those “insta expert insider” newsletters while you are at it. There are some amazingly bad takes out there – still! – telling who ever will listen that this is just a blip in the manifest destiny of craft. Seems folk gotta stick to that script. Props gonna prop.

Bad takes and sometimes bad actors. As we see, given the facts as reported, in this simply inspirational if not somewhat defining subtly saucy take****:

Ultimately, Durstewitz says that to expand, Bevana Partners has to stand for quality and reliability in the eyes of wholesalers, retailers, and most importantly, drinkers. Bevana isn’t a household name now, but Durstewitz says the plan for next year is to create marketing materials like shelf talkers that direct shoppers to Bevana brands specifically, which may be grouped together on a shelf.

May. Be. Note to self: don’t jump into something about a decade late with no real plan other than being taker on the take. And of course, there are the tales of the workplace like this piece by Will Ziebell in The Crafty Pint on burnout in the small scale beer industry. It covers a lot of ground that has been explored before but, still, one wonders who has been writing all those not award winning brewery puff pieces and how (or why) they missed what was apparently right there all around them:

During his time in the industry, Tony says expectations around long hours and bad pay were so common that people would talk about it openly during industry events – and not just between sessions over a beer. “I used to go to the conferences and people would be onstage talking about how we’re in the industry because we love it and the pay is going to be shit with long hours,” he says. “That’s within a presentation experienced brewers are giving us, so it felt like we were being set up to put up with this stuff. You can only do that for so long.”

But… but still… even with all that, all the taking and not giving, there is still good stuff. Stuff worthy of awards or at least admiration. Utterly conversely to the above downpour of downers, Alistair wrote about his recent return to Prague where he once had had an extended residency (something like Cher in Vegas?). Upon his review and found a spot he knew:

…I could have stood there all afternoon just gazing at the city that for 10 years I called home, though this time tinged with melancholy. I was missing Mrs V, and the Malé Aličky, and promised myself that next time I come back to Prague, they will be coming with me. Several times as we strolled through the orchards on the side of the hill, I stopped and just listened, marvelling that such peace and quiet is still possible in a major European capital city. Coming off the hill at Ujezd I spied a brewery sign I hadn’t seen in many years, that of Primátor, and then noticed the sign behind it was for one of our old hangouts, Dobrá Trafika.

And then he wrote about the bar snacks, a favourite theme of mine: “…we had nakládaný hermelín, utopenec, and škvarková pomazánka, with classic Šumavský chleb to spread all the unctuous goodness onto.” No, I have no idea either but it sounds great.

Similarly, Martin found lovely scenes in London and published a photo essay worth checking out. And then he found a seat under an arch:

Two great staff (“Enjoy, my friend“), one cask beer, a 6% IPA that will be in my end of year awards. Cool, chewy, gorgeous (4.5). Proof you only need one cask beer on, just as someone once said. Bit quiet, but then it was 4pm and the mile only gets busy from late on Friday, but the rumble of trains above my head and the jazz soundtrack, at perfect volume, sealed the deal for me.

And Pellicle (as Pellicle does) published another interesting story, this week one by Tim Anderson on beer’s adjacent bev sake explaining both the subject and the experience of researching:

At first I’m afraid this might all go over my head, but Shōji and Momiki are both enthusiastic, good-humoured, and most of all, thorough guides. They take me on an in-depth, whirlwind tour of the entire sake-making process. We visit a sacred water source on top of a mountain, we meet the farmer who grows the rice, and the man who grows the kōji used to ferment it. With all of this presented to me, it becomes easier to understand how sake really can be imbued with meaning, and a sense of place that goes deeper than terroir.

See, that’s good stuff. And there’s gotta be more to read that’s not just a grim reminder. Let’s see what’s out there. Jeff left his notes on the plane. Which is a drag sure but it’s not without, you know, being the cause of a shamelessly cheeky and perhaps even insolent rise of an eyebrow:

I arrived at Portland International Airport last night at 11pm, or 2am on the East Coast time to which my body is currently adjusted. I immediately deplaned, leaving my coat with the notes to brewery tours at Jack’s Abby and Sacred Profane tucked in a pocket. By the time I realized the error and returned, efficient Alaska employees had already buttoned up the gate and departed. All of this is a preamble to today’s rare post of newsy bits—and why I’m outsourcing content today. While I wait with fingers crossed to see if the coat comes back to me, let’s chew on these items.

Come back, Jeff’s coat, come back! That’d be good if it did. And places for beer are still opening like Iron Hat in Alberta, like Recluse Brew Works in Washougal, Washington – and like the new beer spa in Sykesville, MD called BierBath and… and… a place in San Francisco called Otherwise Brewing planning to sell only gluten free beer. So it’s still churning along. And beer is cheap at beaches in Turkey. Don’t forget that. And Mr. Protz joined in on the articles on Dark Star’s version of Prize Old Ale adding plenty of detail:

The beer is astonishingly complex. It pours a deep russet brown with a dense collar of foam. The aroma is dominated by a musty note brewers call “horse blanket” with notes of burnt raisin and sultana fruit, wholemeal biscuits, spice and pepper from the hops, with touches of bitter chocolate, espresso coffee, liquorice and butterscotch. The palate has creamy malt, burnt fruit, spicy hops, coffee, butterscotch, liquorice and acidic notes. The finish is bittersweet with sour fruit, peppery hops, chocolate, coffee and butterscotch with a dry and acidic finale.

Holy gambolling gums! Lots going on there in the theatre of that particular maw. All good.

Yet… yet… and yet… the freshly award winning Jessica Mason has opened my mind scientifically speaking to an entirely new branch of concern with this startling health related news:

…there are multiple documented instances in which children diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome were born to mothers who denied that they consumed alcohol during pregnancy… The studies ultimately concluded that chronic male alcohol exposure – defined as consuming more than five drinks per day in a four-hour window – could create the core fetal alcohol syndrome birth defects.

Really? That’s a lot to take in. What’s next? Well, if only go by these stories in chronoligical order (and entirely for Stan) this is what is next: “‘My dog is drunk’ … owner discovers her dog has hit the bottle.”

Fin. We are done. I know I’m done. When you get to the drunk doggie story, you have to be done. Remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. This week’s update on my emotional rankings? Facebook still in first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (90) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (906) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,427) hovering somewhere above or around my largely ignored Instagram (159), with unexpectly crap Threads (43) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging up the rear – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon but BlueSky is catching up. And even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing beer:

*No, you are!… you’re a big dopey loser with weird hobbies… I’m not… I’m not… quit it… stop.
**The medium may be the message but the messages may vary, too. Just look at this week‘s pointed poke at my font of jealousy from Katie: “We were exceptionally lucky—there was one free table. This never happens, I’m sure. We sat down with our almost-finished pints and ordered a roast dinner and a huge plate of venison stew.”
***Yet in Dorset a “brewery in Peaceful Lane will replace a dilapidated chicken coop” defying all the odds after agreeing to no tap room and no on-site sales.
****And those insta-update about the lawsuits are pure gold!

The Beery News Notes For That Week The USA Does All That Weird Thanksgiving Stuff

It is instructional to live next to a bigger neighbour. As long as they don’t attack you… any more. And by bigger I mean the most influential state in the most powerful nation in the history of the western world. Which is to say I can see a slice of New York state from my office window, peeking back at me out there about ten miles to the south. So we get the TV and radio in addition to the general social media onslaught. And – who knew? – turns out it’s Thanksgiving week and today is Thanksgiving Day! Their Thanksgiving. We Canadians naturally give our thanks for the harvest at harvest time. And we keep it to a wholesome day or two. And find things to do like yard chores. Our pals to the south? It’s like they just discovered treats… to eat!! Even though Halloween was just three weeks ago. Any advice you can offer explaining it all will be most welcome. In local news, the basil is up as illustrated. I am aiming for a wrap around 12 month tiny crop of something or other now that there’s a grow op in my life while some tasty stuff is likely still alive out there under the row covers even with the -9C temps the other night. Jings. Gotta start thinning soon.

Which reminds me of beer. Not. So what is up in beer? Well, for starters, the call for papers for Beeronomics 2024 has gone out:

The 2024 Beeronomics Conference will take place at University of Milan Bicocca, Italy, 19-22 June. Main panels and sessions will be held at the University of Bicocca main campus located in the heart of the city. The Conference Organising Committee, led by Christian Garavaglia, welcomes all high-quality research on the economics of beer and brewing. With a strong interest in interdisciplinary research, we are looking for submissions …

It-lay! That’d be nice in June. Maybe something for Al can be whipped up via AI so I can pretend to be clever enough. Speaking of research, Gary has uncovered facts on the heretofore unknown background of the 1950s English beer writer, Andrew Campbell – stumping even Boak and Bailey who had looked at the mystery some years ago:

It is interesting that they mention theatre – why this occurred to them is not explained. The skein was evidently felt inconclusive, as they repeat that Andrew Campbell was possibly a pseudonymous figure. In fact Andrew Campbell who wrote The Book of Beer was quite real. And there was a theatrical connection.

Speaking of Boak and Bailey, they took a bit of an unsual turn in the road this week as they, the keen observers of others, became something of their own subject matter when they took a family trip to an old favourite Somerset cider farm with a restaurant of sorts attached:

When we entered, Jess immediately said, “This feels like a German beer hall.” And she was right. Not a historic one – the kind you find in a post-war block, or out in the sprawl, or in a neat little village. It’s something to do with all the polished wooden surfaces, perhaps. Or the pervasive smell of roast pork. Or the people: there were plenty of sturdy looking country folk digging into heaped plates. If it wasn’t Bavaria of which it reminded me, then it was one of those diners Guy Fieri visits on Diner, Drive-Ins and Dives.

A great bit of writing. And Matty C has taken on the task of rehabilitating the phrase “reverse creep” with his piece in What’s Brewing, an organ of CAMRA, on the new lower ABV trend in UK beer:

Prior to the legislation’s introduction, breweries would have received a discounted rate for drinks rated at 2.8 per cent ABV or lower. Under the new system it has been extended to account for drinks rated at 3.4 per cent or less. The savings that can be made will likely encourage producers to focus on drinks that are lower in alcohol and therefore, in the government’s eyes, carry less long-term health risks. Encouraging news for a market where younger customers are increasingly focused on mindful consumption and wellness.

The cost implications are significant: “…if, over a year, a small brewery produces 5,000 hectolitres (880,000 pints) of a beer it has reduced from 3.5 to 3.4 per cent, it will make a saving of £211,400.” Moo. Lah. Stonch finds the effect of the tax policy depressing. Colin understands the policy is not the main cause of the lower strength beers. Lots of factors at play but hard to not see this as an opportunity.

I don’t usually go for brewery bios given there too often is a bit of an appropriation or maybe just mimickery at play. But in this piece about a Czech focused brewery in small town Texas of all places, Ruvani de Silva explains the local authenticity:

“The concept of a Czech lager brewery made a lot of sense in Bell County with its rich Czech heritage and the Czech Heritage Museum and Genealogy Center nearby,” he says. “The more I discovered and learned about Czech lager, the more I fell in love with it… I’ve learned so much about my family history and our connections within the community since starting the brewery,” he says. “I’m always probing my grandmother for more stories.” Martinec was inspired to play Czech polka in the brewery after discovering a collection of records in his grandmother’s side table. “They belonged to my great-grandmother and grandfather—my grandmother didn’t even know they were there,” he says. “Now regulars will come by and donate polka records, too.”

Before we go further, say to yourself “soon… soon I will know a lot more about bottle caps” because it is true… because Liam wrote all about it from an Irish perspective:

Before his invention there were other methods of closing bottles, one of the most popular and historic being the plain cork bung of course, and other metal closer had existed but none were quite as strong and easy to apply as Painter’s. His crimp-edged, strengthened metal caps clamped on the edge of specially made bottles with a cork liner between the cap and bottle rim ensuring an airtight fit. These caps were easy to apply and remove and would go on to revolutionise the drinks industry around the world. They were also disposable – they were never designed for reuse – a clever way of ensuring a steady income for those involved in their manufacture.

Next, Katie Mather is on to the second installment of her series on packaged foods called “Process” and this week considers the humble oven fry:

The brand of oven chips you had at teatime was a status symbol when I was a kid. McCain’s Home Fries were the holy grail—if you were having those with your Turkey Drummers, you’d really made it. It’s really strange, I didn’t consider oven chips and deep fryer chips and chippy chips as the same thing. It didn’t occur to me until much later on in life that oven chips were meant to be approximations of the soggy, vinegar-coated potato hunks I was used to from Sam’s Bar on Morecambe seafront. Don’t get me wrong, I loved both of them. But they just weren’t the same food at all. They didn’t even speak the same language.

I always find global references to McCain’s brands odd as it’s from my neck of the woods in the Canadian Maritimes and I even went to undergrad with a McCain.* One of the few dynasties which keeps the lights on in New Brunswick.

Courtney Iseman wrote about the SAFE Bar Network, a program that a nonprofit working with alcohol-serving venues on bystander intervention training in anticipation of one ugly downside of the impending festive season:

…it is also a good time for these conversations because we’ve officially arrived at the holiday season, and this time of year can really crank up the already-intense situation at many bars and restaurants in terms of parties and customers’ drinking and behavior. I know this is unfortunately an impossible wish, but I do hope folks working in bars and breweries and such make it through these season as safe and happy as can be, and—perhaps more realistically—I hope more and more venues see the light and bring in training like SBN.

The Shadowy Portman Group has popped up its head and this time it isn’t complaining about cartoony labels or, you know, anything related to BrewDog. This week it’s defending the booze trade against being lumped in with unhealthy smokers and gunky** processed food fans in a wide ranging study of the costs of unhealthy lifestyles to the UK economy:

The Portman Group, an alcohol industry trade body, said a crackdown on alcohol was unnecessary because most adults drank moderately. The health groups’ proposals, including minimum unit pricing, were “disproportionate and inappropriate”, said Matt Lambert, its chief executive. “Significant progress has been made to tackle harmful drinking in recent years, thanks in part to schemes funded by the alcohol industry, and it is counterproductive to try to prevent further cooperation between the government, industry and third sector organisations on these issues.

They make a reasonable point up there as reported in The Guardian – consult your Hornsey if you need to but we are clearly built to digest alcohol but no one ever rationally claimed a ciggie isn’t a coffin nail. Interesting to note The Times raises another source of health care worry: toxic doctors! Interesting that they are alleged to cause 11,000 deaths per year in the UK while the booze causes just over 9,000. Lesson: don’t forget to take your drink!

In high school, 44 years ago or so, we had a Swedish exchange student on the soccer team and he taught some of us about eating spruce tips. The winter beer Jeff featured this week brought that all back to me:

The brewery puts in a lot of work to create that subtle sweetness. Beginning in May or June, depending on the year’s winter, Dan and members of the brewing and restaurant staff head off to a forest that is just west of town. They harvest sustainably so the trees aren’t harmed—they even need a permit—which means more time. The trees must be a certain height to harvest, and they can’t pick too much of the new growth. “We bring a load of grain bags out with us—it’s beautiful,” he said. “I love it.” It takes more than one visit to collect 200 pounds of tips, which they freeze.

Mmm… tree flavour. It’s the new thing. Stan also wrote about another way to get more tree into your diet:

“I think the thing I love most about the beer is that it certainly makes me feel something, often several things. The time and effort spent harvesting the cedar with my friend realigns my heart to a deeper connection and purpose in brewing. I can feel the sun on my face as I’m reaching to trim a branch in the cool autumn air. I can feel the wind on my face as I give thanks to the grove of trees that play such an important part in the entire experience. Something in me awakens each time I sip.”

Remember how I mentioned that the Russian government nationalized the local branch of Carlsburg, Baltika? Things still getting worse for those involved:

Police and Federal Security Service (FSB) agents carried out more than a dozen searches at offices affiliated with Baltika in St. Petersburg, the local news website Fontanka reported Thursday, citing anonymous sources. Two unnamed Baltika executives were charged with abuse of trust and large-scale fraud, according to Fontanka. The state-run TASS news agency later identified the detained executives as Baltika president Denis Sherstennikov and vice president Anton Rogachevsky, citing a law enforcement source.

Yikes. And I know I include something from Pellicle every week but they really do stand heads and shoulders above other publications. This week, a portrait by Neil Walker of The Coopers Tavern, a modest old pub and the beer it serves:

In front of me sits my deep-gold pint of Joule’s timeless pale ale, glowing and topped with a bright white head of foam, which creates halos down the glass as I sip. But, really, this is a beer for glugging; a subtle well-balanced bitter, with a delicious caramel undertone from the pale tipple malt, a foil for the floral, drying, hop character. The overall impression is of a bittersweet, incredibly drinkable ale, a balm for dry workers’ throats which slips down pint after pint. Underpinning the beer is the same mineral-rich water which made the brewery’s pale ales so sought after a century or so ago, drawn from an ancient Triassic aquifer.

Excellent. A decendant of the Brimstone Alehouse of the 1680s. At another snack bracket appears to be The Devonshire, a big London pub and restaurant complex… oh, sorry… a butchery, bakery, a pub, restaurant and asado complex. What’s an asado? Nick Lander explains:

Welcome to London’s first asado, where the food is cooked entirely over wood embers. Carroll admitted that it had been harrowing at times, assuring everyone from the landlords to numerous representatives of Westminster Council that the process would work and would be safe. Simply, the logs are burnt and then the ingredients are cooked over the embers. It is this process that has made a name for the likes of Asador Etxebarri in Spain, Burnt Ends in Singapore and Firedoor in Sydney, all of whose chefs have been consulted by Carroll and Rogers.

And finally, in their monthly newsletter and for the double, Boak and Bailey have you all pegged. There’s no wiggling out of this one:

If we say that interest in craft beer in the UK began to increase from around 2007 (when we started this blog – a symptom, not a cause) and peaked in around 2014, when our book Brew Britannia came out, that’s plenty of time for a full cycle of hype to play out. There’s a generation of people who have made ‘being into beer’ part of their identity. That includes people who used to blog; people who started breweries; and people who’ve ended up as middle-aged managers in the industry, having started on the frontline a decade ago. Now, they’re getting old.

ZINGGGGG! They’re shit talking us. Deservedly. So here we are, at the end. The time of the sales, the mergers, the moves. Maybe just the beginning of the end but, yes, I feel bad everytime I read an investment announcement of one sort or another. Ouch. No, not commenting on what they said. Just reached over for the mug of tea. Everying aches now. ‘Cause I’m ooooollllld.

Other than that, we are done. Remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. But beware! Mr. Protz lost his Twex account five weeks ago and still hasn’t recovered his 27,000 followers. And Boak and Bailey declared they will #QuitTheTwit at the end of the year. Update on my emotional rankings? Now, for me Facebook remains clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (83) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (905) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,427) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (161), with unexpectly crap Threads (42) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Still trying to figure out the Threads and BlueSky distinction but at this point Threads seems more corporate. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon. And even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing beer:

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

*…not all that rare… also a Labatt as well as Anne Murray’s neice and someone whos godparent was claimed to be the Pope. Et cetera. Et cetera. Lucy MacNeil was in a dorm next to my pal, too. LUCY!! It’s all just one town out there. Go to the tavern for lunch? There’s a member of cabinet. Hit the late night dance club? There is your local MP… dancing with not Mrs. Local MP. Oh dear. Not smart.
**Ouch! Katie Mather just hit me!!!

A Brief But Paradigm Busting Edition Of These Beery News Notes For Mid-November

I’ve been mentioning that beer writing seems to have gone a bit quiet this autumn and – horrors – it’s gotten into such a state of the doldrums that Stan’s booked off until the first Monday in December. Lordy. What to do, what to do? Scour the globe? Look near and far. That’s what we always do. When we are not sifting clues we scour the globe. Beer helps. Had this one on Saturday, bought in Quebec as a standard shelf item with a reasonable price tag. Not sure why we can’t have the nice things they get at the SAQ…

UPDATE: Lew posted a new podcast. Normally I would not encourage podcasting… because… you know… but look at all of what he’s done on one short trip!

Hanover may have thought it was a frontier town, a market town, a transportation hub. But the peckish German-Americans who populated it in the late 1800s and early 1900s knew better. Their ovens and kettles, and a vague hunger between meals, were destined to make Hanover known as Snack Town! My friend Dave Dreese and I hit town on our way to Baltimore, and wow. We visited two of the biggest snack food companies in America, two very old school hot dog joints, and a great butcher shop with their own smoked sausage and cheese. And of course, all those snacky eats need beer, so we hit the town’s six breweries. I interviewed the man who makes the last hand-rolled pretzels in Snack Town, Kevin Bidelspach of Revonah Pretzels.

Two hot dog joints… “two very old school hot dog joints”… Lordy…

Resuming normal service: I am starting off this week with a news item from Jessica Mason published at The Drinks Business at the end of last week. I like this because it acknowledges that values can clash in the world of craft – and not the ones you might think at first:

… even though the regulations and consumer pressures have led to sustainability fast-becoming a “licence to operate”, rather than a “nice-to-have” novelty, beer trends for variety were contrary to the guidance… Stronger consumer appetite for variety over volume has undoubtedly created commercial opportunities for breweries, but producing up to 100 different varieties of beer in a large-scale plant means that short production runs will require more energy and water.

I like that – push back on all thing to all paradigms. The bulk of beer brands are not only fleeting but gotten a bit lazy. Add a sauce or swap the hop so you can change the label. Even the best brewers who attempt to make all things for all people are putting out too many clangers. Focus.

Factoid: One beer in Iceland costs the same as nine beers in Hungary.

In science news, a yeast strain has also pushed back… or perhaps been pushed back by the lab coat wearers at the University of Wisconsin:

A key trait of yeasts used in beer production is the ability to break down maltose, the most abundant sugar in the material used to brew beer. The team chose a yeast strain that had evolutionarily lost this ability despite possessing many of the genes required for maltose metabolism. After running evolution experiments growing the yeast on maltose and selecting decedents that thrived, the lab’s S. eubayanus yeast reacquired the ability to eat maltose.

Hmm… I know that these things are important but wouldn’t starting with the strain that could do the thing you wanted it to do in the first place have been a faster way to get to your goal? Are they just jerking the poor things around?!?! [ED.: …Just a minute… let me check my high school science grades again… hmm… yes, you’re right. I don’t have a clue.] Perhaps similarly in terms of getting somewhere, Mudgie pitched something that, to be honest, I had never considered, probably because it has not yet come from the oracle Elon’s mouth:

…surely one of the main potential benefits of driverless cars is that they will extend mobility to people who are unable to drive themselves either through old age or medical conditions. It is also impossible to have driverless taxis – often suggested as one of the main applications – if there always needs to be a competent driver on board… If an automated taxi can travel without a driver to its pick-up point, then surely it can carry a passenger who is incapable of driving, whether through age, infirmity or intoxication. And if a taxi can do it, why not your own driverless car?

I’m not sure I want to live in that world… but if you give it a quarter century that’s not likely going to be an issue. Question: who cleans up the vom? Conversely, certainly in quesions of personal control, my favourite character is all of beer writing is Delores, Ron’s wife, and this week we learned a bit more about her and her ways when travelling:

Luckily I have Dolores with me. Who, from years of travelling on overcrowded Deutsche Reichsbahn, is an expert in elbowing her way to grab seats. It’s not too difficult as the train isn’t totally packed… “Andrew would have loved it here as a kid. We could have just left him looking out of the window all day.” Dolores isn’t wrong. I’m tempted to do that myself…. Weighed down both by shopping and the kilo of pork in my belly. I sip on whiskey while Dolores flicks through the German channels. We only get five on the Amsterdam cable.

The next day, we read “Dolores has the morning all planned out” which is great news given I have been out and about with Ron and know what the possibilities really are and what needs to be done about it. I was not at all reminded of Ron when I saw this interesting comment on the reasons behind all the Bud Lite $105 million-a-year sponsorship deal with the UFC:

He said: ‘It’s like this whole Bud Light deal. People are talking s*** now. “Sell out” and all this s*** they f***ing say. Believe me, I’m the furthest f***ing thing from a sell out…’I look deeper than just f***ing “oh you know, they did this can with whoever”. I don’t give a s***. You guys think you’re all looking for an apology, they ain’t going to f***ing apologise to you.

My. A couple of bits of experimental hop news came out this week. Stan (because he was not totally slacking) issued another edition of Hop Queries including a few invitations to help with leading edge research like this:

Do not feel left out. The Hop Research Council currently has more than 2,500 pounds each of three varieties that have advanced to elite status available for brewers to use. They expect feedback. That will help determine which ones, if any, get named and become available to farmers. The hops cost $9.25 a pound in 11-pound and 44-pound packages and $10 a pound in one-pound packages. Each has two names: HRC-002 (2000010-008), HRC-003 (W1108-333) and HRC-004 (201008-008). HRC-003 has been top rated in early brewing trials, with intense ripe peach, mango and other tropical aromas.

Here is the form to send in your request to participate in this program. The other hops story appeared in Pellicle where Adam Pierce wrote about a hop called Strangs #7:

The taste of Strang’s #7 is like no other British hop I have experienced before. It has a kaleidoscope of flavours from pithy orange marmalade, tangerine, a touch herbal; dill, lemongrass, a hint of pear drops, sweet bubblegum and finally the “controversial” coconut note, similar to the one found in the Japanese Sorachi Ace and North American American Sabro varieties.

Note: the role of beer league hockey’s most important team member explained.

And the latest edition of London Beer City was released by Will Hawkes last Friday and includes a short study of Eko Brewery at Unit 2A-2, Copeland Park, Peckham:

Eko bucks the trend by drawing on African drinking culture and brewing techniques and recipes, plus ingredients such as palm sugar, cassava, yam and hops grown in South Africa. “The main focus is to incorporate African ingredients in the beer,” says Anthony, “but the first beer we made [in 2018] didn’t have any African ingredients – but it was low bitterness, low carbonation, to ensure it went well with food, which is the way beer is enjoyed in Africa.” Anthony grew up in Peckham and his family comes from Nigeria (Eko is the Yoruba name for Lagos), while Helena’s are from Congo. That’s had a big impact on her approach to beer. “In Congo, women drink a lot of beer,” she says. “My mum, my aunties drank beer when I was growing up. A lot of the women in my family drank beer more than the men.”

I love auntie culture. I had aunties. And aunts too. Two separate categories.

Speaking of assigning categories, a court ruling about beer from Canada’s top court was published in the Ontario Gazette this week, months after its actual release by the Supremes. Facts are always fascinating:

A constable of the Ontario Provincial Police (“OPP”) formed the intention on a highway to randomly stop the respondent to ascertain his sobriety, and followed him onto a private driveway to do so. Once the constable approached the respondent, he observed obvious signs of intoxication and the respondent indicated that he might have had 10 beers. Two subsequent breathalyzer tests revealed that the respondent’s blood alcohol concentration was above the legal limit.

Why did this get to the highest court in the land? The random stop… tsk-tsk… nope… naughty naughty:

…the police officers did not have statutory authority under s. 48(1) of the HTA to follow the respondent onto the private driveway to conduct the random sobriety stop. Accordingly, the police officers breached the respondent’s rights under s. 9 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms…

Also here in Ontario, @starbeer of the Toronto Star is speculating and rumour mongering again (based largely on things like “investigative journalism” and “fact gathering”!!!). As we’ve been monitoring for the best part of the decade, we the agreement governing our semi-monopolistic big brewery owned sales outlet is coming up and it appears that the government is not going to renew the deal with the imaginatively named The Beer Store (TBS). This effectively places all beer retailing policies on the table. I don’t have the text of the Star article (as it’s behind a pay wall and I save my pennies for other things like cheese) but BlogTO is providing a helpful summary of the issues including:

The agreement as it stands now expires in 2025, and this year is the cutoff for when the government must notify affected parties if it is not being renewed. And experts are noting that the Beer Store has been downsizing and selling off multiple properties in recent years, cutting four per cent of its footprint… While talk of the vendor potentially closing is nothing more than a rumour at this point, many citizens appear to feel strongly about the subject, with the vast majority celebrating the end of what they see as one of many problematic monopolies or oligopolies in the province. Then there are the thousands of jobs that will be lost if the Beer Store goes under, and the fears that beer prices could actually end up going up.

Concidentally… as most things I report in a week are… big brewer Labatt is expanding its London Ontario plant with a 27 million investment:

The new machines will see beer packaged using paperboard — which is one layer of paper compared to recycled cardboard which is three layers of heavy paper. It will also use less glue than older machines… “It allows us to get our products to market for consumers in the most sustainable way possible…” the new tanks will also expand the capability to ferment beer by over 59 million litres — the equivalent of 24 Olympic sized swimming pools… “Our London brewery is the largest in Labatt’s network, brewing over 40 per cent of the beer we brew for Canadians, and this significant investment boosts the facility’s production capacity and sustainability performance…”

Someone is optimistic. And look – there it is again: sustainablility. Greenwashing? Cost cutting? Or real? Going back to the question of the TBS agreement, who will take on the bottle recycling the TBS does now if a deal doesn’t continue? Who knows. But the province is moving to a general scheme of producer paid recycling generally so maybe that’s at play. Another question: can price rises be stopped in at least one respect? See, the currents scheme has for almost a century levelled prices throughout the province. Meaning a beer bottled next to one TBS retail outlet costs the same as when sold that beer is sold at a remote TBS outlet. Effectively, southerners and urban folk subsidize transportation costs for more remote Ontarians. The roads are still poor and beer is heavy. Back in 2012, the CBC reported that as an odd consequence booze is relatively far cheaper in northern Ontario.

Relatedly, Victim of Maths has shown a similar phenomenon affecting “Today’s Britain Today”*:

Arguments about the affordability of alcohol during the cost-of-living crisis also don’t seem to hold much water. The fact that alcohol prices rose at lower than inflation levels means that even a stagnation in disposable incomes didn’t stop alcohol becoming *more* affordable.

As per usual, he provided a handy graph which I have included for your clicky pleasure. Note how beer in the UK becomes notably even more affordable compeared to wine and the hard stuff right around in the mid-2000s and becomes slowly more and more so. And concurrently climate change may be playing a role too – at least in terms of pure alcohol levels according to Jancis:

As the planet warms up and dries out, it is going to be increasingly difficult to make wines below 14% anyway. I recently attended a tasting of 32 red bordeaux from vintages 2011 to 2019 from the stocks of Justerini & Brooks, a traditional wine merchant not known for favouring flashy wines. Seven of these clarets had 14.5% on the label and two 15%. This would have been unimaginable in the last century.

And finally, just as the previous discussion was triggered by thoughts on the meaning of “full-bodied” in today’s market, Matthew Lawrence of Seeing the Lizards was posting at Twex and responded to the challenge to create a top ten list of beer euphemisms: 1. lively = overcarbonated; 2. easy drinking = flat; 3. juicy = sludge; 4. aged = musty; 5. light = tasteless; 6. fruity = syrup; 7. dank = weed soup; 8. imperial = loopy juice; 9. blonde = bland; 10. challenging = undrinkable. Like. Your list? You could even do one forensically in five year increments for craft beer. Talk among yourselves. I might add overly ripe exclamations as seen in reaction to beer news from “…utter joy to read…” to “…totally gutted by…” or even the “brewery is one of the most successful in the country…” Please.

Done. Remember, ye who read this far down to see if I have edited these closing credits and endnotes (as I always do), you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. But beware! Mr. Protz lost his Twex account five weeks ago and still hasn’t recovered his 27,000 followers. Update on my emotional rankings? Now, for me Facebook remains clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (80) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (903) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,429) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (161), with unexpectly crap Threads (42) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon. And even though it is #Gardening Mastodon that still wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing beer:

*My dream of a name for a current affairs show.

Your Beery News Notes For The Solemn Pause Before The Festivities

The question of when one begins to get Christmassy in Canada includes a particular matter of etiquette and propriety. We have Remembrance Day on November 11th and it is often said that the commercialization of Halloween and the commercialization of Christmas need to take a seat in early November to pause. It is a good idea but not one enforced with any particular stridency. Now that I am somewhat shocked to be in my seventh decade, it is good remind those whose youth didn’t include regularly runninging into known veterans of the world wars that there were people who didn’t get to be in old age. I often think at this time of year of the relatives like my great-uncle John who came back from the trenches in 1918 shellshocked as well as his sister great-aunt Madge who was a frontline nurse in the north African campaign. And, as mentioned two years ago, I think of the man at the naval memorial downtown in 2005. It is good to pause to think about such things.

And while we pause we still can consider the state of the world, including the lighter things like beer and the adjacents. Which has been a bit quiet over the last week, too. Good thing, too, as I had to dash over to Montreal to do some paperwork last Friday but still took the time to get a small measure of ice perry into me and eat at Arthurs. I reserve the right to retire to Montreal. You are on notice – vous et vous aussi! Slow, yes, but with a bit of digging, there were stories right there to be read. Look, we had local news of a beery nature, the tale of an unfortunate delivery van which had also paid a visit to La Belle Province:

In a case of the odd and perplexing, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) have charged the driver of a rental van who continued to drive after blowing a tire, ostensibly in an attempt to get away with an illegal – and massive – alcohol purchase… While speaking with the driver, officers noticed four cases of beer the the front passenger’s seat area, all of which had only French labelling on the box. Questioned about the beer, the driver became and remained evasive, even as police confronted the driver about the transportation of beer from Quebec into Ontario. Police then carried out a search of the vehicle and found “the entire back of the van was filled with beer cases,” the OPP said.

Jings. Others have been out and about, too. ATJ, for example, was in a very nice seat and got a view of a hobbity decor. Not so many going out in Hong Kong, so CNN reports due to the departure of expats as well as locals with access to foreign passports:

Increasingly, these two groups are being replaced by people from mainland China, who now account for more than 70% of the 103,000 work or graduate visas granted since 2022, according to the Immigration Department. The newly dominant migrants, economists point out, tend to have very different spending habits. Yan Wai-hin, an economics lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the city’s previously robust nightlife was propped up largely by a base of expats and middle-class locals steeped in the time-honored drinking culture of enjoying a nice cold one after a long day. “The makeup of the population is different now,” Yan said. “Now we have more immigrants from the mainland, and they tend to love to go back to mainland China to spend instead.”

Times past weren’t like today. I was reminded (despite craft beer’s fibbery that there was a singular craft beer revolution) that the “generally revolution related to all consumer products” has been all around us all at least since when I were a lad, as confirmed again by this bit of rearview mirroring in The Times about an aspect of The Times, one that’s always struck me as odd:

…on the afternoon of July 16, 1972, Tony Laithwaite pulled off the motorway on his way back to Windsor after visiting his parents in the Lake District. What happened next changed Britain’s drinking habits for good. Laithwaite bought a copy of The Sunday Times and saw his name in the letters page. He had written to praise the newspaper’s exposé of unscrupulous UK bottlers who were buying vin that was distinctly ordinaire but labelling it as Margaux, Meursault and many other top French names. Laithwaite was all too aware of the problem. After years working in French vineyards he had returned to the UK to set up Bordeaux Direct, which imported cases directly “from châteaux that do actually exist”, he wrote in his letter. The counterfeiters were hurting his business.

What developed out of that letter eventually became the creation of The Sunday Times Wine Club which was led in part by Hugh Johnson who wrote The World Atlas of Wine in 1971 as well as since 1977 the invaluable annual pocket guides to wine which certainly led certain people to think that beer might benefit from a similar set of such things, ran with it and away it went and here we are. But I had not really twigged that the original motivation was counterfeiting counterfeiters! Heavens. Never one to merely counterfeit, appropriate or really even emulate, TBN provided the unexpected turn of phrase of the week:

Schnitzel doesn’t grow on trees, or so I believed until Privatbrauerei Schnitzlbaumer entered my life, its name conjuring an image of juicy breaded cutlets, hanging ready to be picked.

Ah, the land of schnitzel trees… ah… Perhaps conversely, GBH has taken a break from its cycle of fast fading news summaries and brewery owner bios (BOBs) from places you (likely still) will never go to and taken a page (and perhaps a topic) from Pellicle with this wonderful (and perhaps followup*) article on Gales Prize Old Ale by our friend and mentor (he now in his third decade of comment making at this here blog) Martyn:

I’m standing in the tasting room at Meantime Brewing Company in Greenwich, southeast London, drinking the latest iteration of Gales Prize Old Ale, an almost unique survivor from Britain’s brewing past. Set to be released on November 16, this new edition is just about the only U.K. beer made in what Spanish sherry producers call the “solera style,” where a fresh batch is added each year to a vat containing the remnants of editions from previous years. This process means uncounted generations of Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, and other yeasts and organisms survive and thrive to add fresh depth—and strength—to a beer that is powerful enough at the outset. Prize Old Ale goes into the vat around 9% ABV. A couple of years later, it can come out at 11%.

Fabulous. Fantastic even. Another of my favourite writers, Katie Mather, sent out good news this week on a new series she is publishing called “Process”:

I plan to share 10 essays over 10 weeks, talking about my personal connections to certain snacks, and discovering the mysteries and interesting histories of some of our most taken-for-granted and newly hated foods. I want to show how integral to modern life processed food is, and how interesting it is that we’ve be taught to find the idea of refining ingredients into convenience food repulsive.

Wonderful. Sign up. And Jeff wrote an excellently innovative thing this week (doing what ought to be done more by all) when he explored one small corner of our good beer culture and cast a broader light on the best of all this:

To arrive at Dave Selden’s workshop, you wind down a wooded lane next to picturesque river. I would like to report that it gets ever narrower until arriving at a rustic, moss-covered cabin deep in the fir trees, but in fact it’s actually housed in one corner of a metal warehouse. The dreamlike experience picks up again inside, however. Packed into a space about the size of a large dining room are strange artifacts of a steampunk past. Dave is the creator of 33 Books, a small company that started as a kind of analog Untappd (and in the same year, 2010, by coincidence). His first product was 33 Bottle of Beers, a little notebook the size of the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Beer fans could record their encounters with tasty ales and lagers inside, even tracing out a spider graph of the flavors if they wanted to really get their nerd on.

Love it. Dave was an early supporter of the dearly departed annual Yuletide Kwanzaa, Hogmanay, Christmas and Hanukkah photo contest and sent off wee packets of 33 Bottle of Beers to lucky winners.

And Jordan wrote many interesting words on the upcoming re-regulation / de-regulation of the beer retail trade in Ontario which is an exceptionally good lens through which to consider any retail structure in any jurisdiction but one that requires a measure of patience with the acronyms and percentages if one is going to get a correct understanding, as this passage illustrates well:

At the time that the MFA went into effect in 2015, The Beer Store made up 50.3% of the alcohol retail market in Ontario, with the LCBO sitting at 37.7%. This has largely reversed as a result of the MFA and the dwindling market share of beer when compared to wine and spirits, but mostly because of the MFA. The Beer Store now sits at 41.7% of the alcohol retail market while the LCBO is up to 51.9%. The Beer Store still controls 64.61% of the beer market in the province, with LCBO making up 35.39%. What this means is that by becoming the wholesaler for wine, beer, and cider in grocery, the LCBO’s remittance to the province of Ontario has gone from $1.81 Billion to $2.55 Billion over the course of something like an eight year period, not including calendar year 2023. The MFA, which allows grocery retail, is worth $750 million to the province on an annual basis, and that amount is likely to increase over time as the number of LCBO convenience outlets has quietly grown by 180 over the same period while the number of Beer Stores has dropped by 30 to 420.

I do have one quibble and that is the tinyiest too much bit of weight given to the role of cannibus in the overall calcuation of what’s happening to craft beer. Generally speaking I mean, not by Jordan. As he notes in extremely appropriate detail, someone in Ontario “could get 1.53 times as much Cannabis in Dec 2022 for the same amount of money you would have paid in Dec 2018.” Me, I understand this is indicative of a glut and a consumer interest for weed that is far less than originally anticipated. It’s own separate fail. While Jordan’s points are aimed elsewhere, at the effect of excise taxation on these matters, it is important to put again on the table that craft beer is failing in part by its own doings and not as much due to external competative pressures as some might want to say. Yes, the paradigm shifted well before the pandemic and before the inflation but those blows have piled on. Which means we the clinky drinky of craft are all now out at sea, floating of an ice shelf as spring approaches.** Stay tuned for more from Jordan on the new regularory arrangements, however, which need to be in place in Ontario in about 18 months.

In another example of its thoughtful and frankly superior touch, Pellicle this week features a piece on a welcoming Glasgow pub, The Laurieston:

As you enter The Laurieston, arrows point towards the public bar on the left and lounge bar on the right, both served by the same raised island bar. Most of the original furnishings are in a well-used but good condition, including red vinyl covered arm chairs, tartan curtains, custom red Formica tables, a raised gantry with wood panelling and a suspended canopy with built-in lights. The old McGee’s hot pie heater sits to the right of the bar, a family heirloom serving hungry customers Scotch pies with a good lick of gravy and peas piled pleasingly on top. “A three course meal!” Joseph says with a wry smile.

I want to be there. Conversely, Ron has continued his explorations of where I don’t want to be – back the 1970s – with his excellent piece on the function of recycling the returns:

I take the piss out of Watney for all the returned crap that they mixed into their beers. Didn’t that make their beer rubbish? But I only know that because I’ve seen their internal quality control document. Which shows 10% of “stuff” added to most beers after fermentation. Due to the tax system in the UK, adding crap on which there was effectively no tax made a huge deal of sense. Financially. The brewers weren’t so keen. Derek Prentice told me of the effort it took to stop Fullers trying to recycle beer, even when it made no real financial sense any more. After the introduction of brewery-gate taxation.

And Gary has continued his long series on “drumming” which was the parlance for traveling sales folk in North America and beyond around a century or so ago. In the seventh post on the matter, he shares in detail what he has found out about one Mr.Kauffman:

It seems fairly clear this American was Kauffman. Like most good sales people he included a dose of exaggeration when recounting his success to the two Americans trailing him. Of course too, it is a trite datum of beer historical studies that American beer sales were almost completely domestic at the time, and remained so for decades to come.

Finally, the British Guild of Beer Writers has announced the nominees for this years awards. A good selection for sure… thought I have never understood the surprise folk express for being nominated when they themselves submitted the applications and associated fees. And, yes, some concerns as to some named have been raised but isn’t that always the case… and sometimes warranted. That being said, these awards are clearly the premier contest. The top drawer. I particularly like the openness about the corporate sponsors and that the focus on trade writing is clear. The role and the goal here is to add to CVs. Nothing wrong with that. If you’ve decided this is your path.

Still, I wish there were more routes to recognition for other sorts of writing. I know I have said it before. Maybe a few categories even with open nominations, a readers choice award? Maybe structured to encourage more non-trade views, a greater variety beyond the BOBs and the tourism board funded pieces. Even a lot of the inclusion oriented writing is falling into habits. When you read the amount that I do week after week, the sameness can be striking. If that’s the goal of the “citizen” and “self-published” categories, it could be made clearer, the measuring sticks explained. As I mentioned the other day, the final result of any rational anaysis is that we are all really just weirdos. So shouldn’t it be about being more widely welcoming weirdos, too?***

Done. That’s a lot. As per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. But beware! Mr. Protz lost his Twex account and still hasn’t recovered his 27,000 followers. Update on my emotional rankings? Now, for me Facebook remains clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (78) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (903) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,430) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (164), with unexpectly crap Threads (42) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon. And even though (even with the Halloween night snows) it is #Gardening Mastodon that really wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing beer:

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

*Compare, careful reader, just for example how in September 2022 we read that the “…long boil produced caramelisation and darkening of the wort, which was then fermented in wooden fermenters…” with in November 2023 that the “…long boil produced caramelization and darkened the wort, which was fermented in wooden vessels…“! I have nothing but admiration and even wonder if he thought of the prospect of this very future footnote as the keyboard’s keys clicked.
**It was actually quite charming this week to read otherwise in a newsletter this week sweetly suggest this inordinately bland and decontextualized advice: “unlocking outside-the-box ideas without the preconceived notions that often surround decision-makers can serve as a welcome breath of fresh air” like we were back in 2015 or so…
***Probably need to work this idea a bit more – and noting the hours to press time – but if I read another beer writer lamenting how fewer and fewer are interested in beer or how there is more interest in wine… without noticing they themselves are one of the spokespersons for the topic, not noticing they are complaining about their own shortfalls… well, it boggles a bit. And I got to thinking along these lines even more when I read this passage, again in The Times, about someone called Nicky Haslam, apparently one of the great exclusionary English bores of our times: “Old-fashioned posh is losing its landmarks. Internationalisation has done what democratisation could not. Things that are now considered crass are not working class but originate in the United States. These things will take hold and become “common” at warp speed because of social media…. they are a threat to a unique sense of British identity. My list would include: fasting. Ice plunges. Leg day at the gym. Infra-red saunas. Green smoothies. Cockapoos. Botox and lip filler. College consultants. Being overtly spiritual. Virtual reality games. Helicopter parenting. To resist this fretful, vain, striving, to resist describing that journey on your own podcast, is to stay British, and to stay classy.” Apparently strawberries are to be shunned now! Brilliant. Message: don’t even strive because once you get there, be honest, your sort still won’t be welcomed. Classy? That’s what this sort of class really is. Code for caste. Who needs it? It’s like those from that closed set of the constrained and privileged who bleat about “identity politics” in others when it comes to public policy. Code as cloak. Forget that. Better to be interested and interesting. Best to be weird. Welcoming and weird.

The Clocks Are Changing The Clocks Are Changing Edition Of The Beery News Notes

“…Poop Damn Crap Poop Poopy Crap…”

November. Frig. I never understood why April was the cruellest month when there’s November just a few pages further on in the calendar. What’s so wrong with stirring those “dull roots with spring rain” anyway? Beats the hell out of the prospect of week after week of avoiding frost bite and roadside dead car batteries. This week we went from sunny and +16C on Saturday aft to -4C on Tuesday morning. I filled a bird feeder. I have to fill it again. Those birds are already pissed off with the level of service. And Wednesday we woke to that layer of white shit shown above. Took the photo through the window screen. I would have taken it through the curtain and maybe my bed’s blankets if I could have. I just got that raised bed planted with garlic in time. Poop crap. I even coined a phrase for not drinking this month – Nofunber.

What’s going on with beer? First, Pellicle published an excellent piece on the Double Diamond phenomenon. In the mid-1980s, Double Diamond showed up on keg in my old hometown, the old navy town of Halifax, Nova Scotia around the same time as Guinness did. It was during the beers of the world fad which got going around the same time that the first Maritime micros like the Granite at Gingers and Hanshaus were starting up. Anyway, there are still pals who never really got all that much into beer who still fondly recall the easy sweet taste of Double Diamond at the old Thirsty Duck on Spring Garden Road and how it was tied to the old country:

The name Double Diamond is said to originate from the two interlocking diamond shaped symbols that would have been used to mark cask barrels at the time. And throughout the 1950s all the way through to the 1970s, Double Diamond was one of the best selling beers in the UK. “The rise and fall of [Double Diamond’s] popularity would track the fortunes of the company,” wrote Ian Webster in his book Ind Coope & Samuel Allsopp Breweries: The History of The Hand. “Double Diamond was the leading light, the headline act, the A-list star. It isn’t an overstatement to say that the history of Double Diamond was also the history of the company.” Quite the responsibility to lay on a single beer, is it not?

So… turns we got it pushed out to us after it slumped in the UK. Typical. Read the whole thing to find out why. Excellent writing.

Also excellent is the review by Boak and Bailey of the new and also apparently excellently honest ‘zine edited by the same Rachel Hendry… Service Please!:

There’s also a strand of depressive melancholia: accounts of derailed creative careers, repetitive shifts, and the pressure to perform cosy cheeriness on loop every single day. Even when we’re not being utter dicks, we customers are a wearying lot. In one cartoon, by Ceara Colman, a barista is slowly ground down by one customer after another calling them hun, babe, love…

Trooff, that. And I really liked Alistair‘s post at Fuggles that missed last week’s deadline by a hair. He came upon a brewery in Virginia that has taken the too often ignored concept of an honest beer at an honest price to a new level and explored what the implications of oddly unpopular proposition that value pricing posed:

I am pretty sure this move it going to stir the pot in craft brewing circles in Virginia, especially given the number of breweries where they are changing $7 and upwards for a pint at their taproom… I also love the fact that Tabol don’t shy away from the fact that beer is the everyman drink rather than a niche product for the upper middle classes… [W]here a brewery’s taproom is exactly that, a place to drink a brewery’s beer, in situ, as fresh as fresh could possibly be, without the additional logistical steps that drive up the price, then cheaper than draft or packaged retail should be the norm. If this move drives down the cost of a beer, that is a good thing in my world. After all, isn’t that one of the supposed benefits of increased competition?

Desperate or clever? Hmm… hopefully there will be more on this breaking story from Alistair. Somewhat but not really that connected, Martin visited a university student union that was also a ‘Spoons which is a bit confusing to an auslander like me. I thought the cheapest way to get beer into the hands of students was to have the students sell it themselvesto themselves at their own bars. Is ‘Spoons more efficient than even that?

Speaking of value, there more this week on Russia’s nationalization grab of Carlsberg’s branch operation Baltika:

“There is no way around the fact that they have stolen our business in Russia, and we are not going to help them make that look legitimate,” said Jacob Aarup-Andersen, who took over as CEO in September. Carlsberg had eight breweries and about 8,400 employees in Russia, and took a 9.9 billion Danish crown ($1.41 billion) write-down on Baltika last year. Aarup-Andersen said that from the limited interactions with Baltika’s management and Russian authorities since July, Carlsberg had not been able to find any acceptable solution to the situation.

Err… solution? Maybe leave when the Ukraine was first invaded… in 2014… or when Georgia was invaded… in 2008? Hmm…

Things not being as they seem may also have been the theme at the National Beer Wholesalers Association if their graph shared at Craft Brewing Business is anthing to go by. I’ve edited it for you. Click here. My update makes it much clearer that the “50” level mid-graph is actually indicating zero growth over in the specific US beer market segment. Meaning any sector scoring below the middle is shrinking. Only imports are showing anything like real growth as reported. Craft is taking a beating only saved from the basement by seltzers… which aren’t even beer. Neither are the other big losers ciders, come to think of it. In fact, the story of the graph appears to be that of all beer sectors, craft sales are ditching by far the most drastically. Plenty more than just high level generational demographics making that happen. Especially in a strong US economy.

Speaking of questions, the BBC posed an interesting one this week – “would you drink genetically modified beer?”:

In the UK, GM foods can be authorised by the Food Standards Agency, if they are judged “not to present a risk to health, not to mislead consumers, [and] not to have less nutritional value than their non-GM counterpart”… US brewers using gene-edited yeast in their products is “a secret everyone [in the industry] knows about”… beer makers will rarely promote the fact due to the negative headlines GM technology has received so far. Meanwhile, brewing yeast expert Richard Preiss says that “in the US, you can really do what you want”. He is lab director at Escarpment Labs in Ontario, Canada. It provides more than 300 breweries with yeast, but does not use GM. “You can take [in the States], for example, the genome from basil, and plug it into yeast, and get to market fast with a flavoured beer.”

To be honest, I assume I consume GMOs all the time in my beer. I may grow my own herbs and greens in an all organic yard that a mow with a manual push maching and create special hidey-holes for natitve bees… but my beer? Who knows what crap is in that stuff? Not me! Do you? The question of GMOs in good beer actually strikes me as one of those “journalism / not journalism” beer topics. Much like the silent response to, say, the closing down of the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Or, you know, any meaningful discussion of value when it comes to good beer. Just a few of those things that exist in the culture… but no one mentions. Eh. Var.

Converely, Jeff wrote a good piece for VinePair setting out the whole narrative arc in the rise and fall of Hazy IPA – from rare whale to gas station bulk craft – that serves as a good lesson for us all:

The fact that hazy IPAs may have lost some of their cultural power is merely a shadow of the far more significant fact that they have remained so popular for so long. Rather, as they prepare to enter decade two of life, hazies appear to have found equilibrium. Their early success was inflated by oversupply at the small-brewery level, and undersupply nationally, a dynamic that is coming into balance. Their strength remains strong in some regions but less so in others. And they no longer generate the level of excitement that forces people to wait in long lines for the privilege of buying a new release.

It’s been so long since we have had any sort of innovation in craft beer that we forget things like Hazy IPA were once sorta exciting and not just an alt hard seltzer filling the fewer remaining bulk craft shelves at US convenience stores. But these are those times we live in. These be the times. Relatedly, Stan set me a challenge this week in his weekly post on Monday:

Back to “peak of craft.” What does that mean? Is that peak sales? Peak quality? Peak choice? Peak cultural sway? And if the peak has come and gone, how does post-peak beer compare to post-industrial, postmodern, and post-Fordist beer? Can’t wait until Thursday to see if McLeod has answers at A Good Beer Blog.

That call to fess up relates to the cover of the New Yorker from 2014 right there. I mentioned that it had popped up in my FB feed and reminded me of those better days at that time. My response to Stan was that the cover was just the peak point of the cool of craft, the actual brief golden era when there was general public interest and before the wheels had started to come off. Back in 2014, craft was cool. Probably as cool as it would ever be. Now it is in what sociologists call its Sombrero Phase. Still, this all sorta ties into a few other recent posts. Jordan doing a bit of soul searching given the greater picture:

…how am I supposed to write about Craft Beer? Hell, in a situation where everyone is strapped, can you ethically ask for samples for review? Am I going to write about trends? What trends? Someone’s going to put hops or puree in one of the remaining unhopped styles?

Exactly – what trends? The trend of “nothing new” has been the new so long it’s really just the known for the bulk of newbie entrants to the beer buying experience. Jeff was also reflecting and and considers the longer timeline:

Time’s lessons can bring us a certain equanimity about what is important and what merely seems important. On example that has been rising in my mind a lot lately is this one: I don’t need to get worked up about what other people like and, in fact, I can take real pleasure in people who don’t like the things I like. This seems like a banal enough observation—like, really, who cares what beer you drink or car you drive or brand of shoes you wear?

I get it. Both time and the times do wear down upon us. And yet… and yet we still can care even if we aren’t all that cool anymore. Witness Boak and Bailey going on a hobby interest renewal holiday to Berlin and posting some very insightful writing about the observed beer culture there, one about five Pilsners and another about wegbiers – beers bought in small shops for drinking on the way as you walk from one place to another:

… there’s nothing remotely pretentious about these shops. They also sell Monster energy drinks, chocolate bars, ice cream, vapes, and bog roll. That the beers are being sold to drink on the go is underlined by the presence on the counter of a bottle opener. Hand over your cash, knock off the cap, and you’re away. And that’s exactly what people do.

That’s sorta nerdy neato. And Lars had another sort of experience in an alternate reality, too:

My destination: the cheese world championship, where I am to comment on beer/cheese combinations. (I wonder if this might really be national only, though.) So, up there I’m supposed to comment on five cheeses and three beers and how they match. Never tasted any of them before. No idea how this will work out. I guess that worked pretty well. We all of us basically had to just wing it. So you taste the combination and just say whatever comes first to mind.

And The Beer Nut himself did a great job with the keen observational, even self-deprecating wit at the Belgian Beer Challenge, another stop on the Möbius strip of generic international beer awards circuit:

…Belgians, I imagine, are better at this than me…

But… we are told some Belgians were allowed to join in. Which is nice. All of which leads to the question – is there a common aspect to this weirdness? None of it is all that cool, for sure. It’s weird. But is that so wrong? NO – be weird! For now… for us… maybe it’s all just odd enough that good beer still may be a good lens to view this life’s rich pageant or at least good for a laugh – even if it is sometimes at its own expense.

There we are. Hope you’ve enjoyed yourselves once again. Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight. As per always and forever, you can check out the many ways to find good reading about beer and similar stuff via any number of social media and other forms of comms connections. But beware! Mr. Protz lost his Twex account and his 27,000 followers this week. Update on my emotional rankings? Now, for me Facebook remains clearly first (given especially as it is focused on my 300 closest friends and family) then we have BlueSky (77) rising up to maybe pass Mastodon (900) then the seemingly doomed trashy Twex (4,434) hovering somewhere above or around Instagram (168), with unexpectly crap Threads (41) and not at all unexpectedly bad Substack Notes (1) really dragging – and that deservedly dormant Patreon presence of mine just sitting there. Seven apps plus this my blog! That makes sense. I may be multi and legion and all that but I do have priorities and seem to be keeping them in a proper row. All in all I still am rooting for the voices on the elephantine Mastodon. And even though (even with the Halloween night snows) it is #Gardening Mastodon that really wins over there, here are a few of the folk there discussing beer, :

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