Comments on: Before beer blogging, there was Boston on Beer

By: A Brief History of CAMRA Bashing | Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog

A Brief History of CAMRA Bashing | Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 06:53:55 +0000

[...] first off the blocks was Richard Boston in The Guardian. Having boosted CAMRA’s membership by several thousand with his weekly columns and frequent [...]

By: Nick Boley

Nick Boley — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 08:54:36 +0000

I have an original copy of Beer and Skittles – bought with Christmas money in 1976. A bit dog-eared and going brown, pages falling out. Still get asked by friends new to CAMRA to borrow. It is an excellent read, and shows how little things have actually changed in many respects.
He had a great turn of phrase, for example describing Everards as returning to the path of righteousness when they started brewing cask ale again with Old Original – I remember it well as a student in Loughborough in the 70s being able to drink guilt-free in Everards pubs although a session on Old Original could lead to problems staying upright!

By: Alan

Alan — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 01:25:06 +0000

XOXO

By: Bailey

Bailey — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 22:30:12 +0000

Thanks. Also, ouch.

By: Lars Marius Garshol

Lars Marius Garshol — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 22:23:31 +0000

“Every week, he came up with something to say, even if the occasional column seemed rather contrived under the pressure of a deadline.”

You know, that sounds exactly like you guys. Yeah, sometimes it sounds contrived. So what? Most of it is great, and nobody gets it right all the time.

By: Bailey

Bailey — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 21:01:19 +0000

And there’s never too much detail.

By: Ron Pattinson

Ron Pattinson — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 19:38:52 +0000

You can never contextualise too much.

By: Alan

Alan — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 11:55:14 +0000

From his obit: ‘…Anne Boston, his wife for a few years from 1968 until the mid-1970s, says he was the only man she ever knew to wake himself up laughing…” http://beerblog.genx40.com/archive/2006/december/richardboston67

His non-beer writing is a useful source of contextualizing the themes that were going around at certain points in time… if anyone was thinking about contextualizing that sort of stuff.

By: Phil

Phil — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 11:35:54 +0000

Richard Boston was a wonderful writer - one of the few who really defined the Guardian as something more than a paper for well-meaning liberals. Also, he got me into real ale (see paragraphs 4 and 5), so a posthumous Cheers for that.

By: Curmudgeon

Curmudgeon — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 09:44:05 +0000

Yes, Beer and Skittles contains quite a long section on the different types of pub bores. Of beer bores, he says:

“At their very worst, groups of beer bores form into herds that roam the country in search of inoffensive pubs where the beer is not of the approved kind, and then proceed to bully the landlord and customers. Such behaviour is intolerable.”

You could say they have now metamorphosed into “tickers”

“Can’t you just get me one from the cellar, then?”