News, Nuggets & Longreads 24/05/2014

After the longest break we’ve taken from blogging in a while, here’s our usual Saturday morning round-up of what’s good to read.

(A report on ‘what we did on our holidays’ will follow tomorrow.)

→ Tony Naylor’s piece on unfiltered/unfined beer for The Guardian rather echoes our thoughts on the matter:

I can’t deny the aesthetic appeal of the perfect clear pint. But I also realise that is a rather daft, inherited prejudice. Moreover, this criticism of “London murky”… seems to spring from a general cynicism about the febrile creativity of the craft beer scene, rather than objective fact.

→ Adrian Tierney-Jones found a fascinating letter from 1921, concerning questions of the clarity, quality and price of beer: “How are we to reconcile the taste for acidity, common or peculiar to the cider districts, with the taste for soft drinking mild, free from the slightest acidity, pertaining to the next county?”

→ Saved to Pocket this week: a piece by Jonathan Moses about the architecture of the famous Black Friar pub in the City of London.

→ ‘Even Ulan Bator has Irish Pubs‘ is the latest beer-related piece from the BBC news magazine, which seems to be committed to the subject:

IPC’s designers offered to fit out Irish pubs abroad in one of four basic styles – the “country”, a cottage-like room with stone floors and wooden beams; the “shop”, intended to resemble a bar which doubles as a hardware store or pharmacy; the “brewery”, with cobbled floors and upturned tables; and the “Victorian”, an ornate interior fashioned after Dublin’s grander hostelries. There later came the “Celtic”, which saw Gaelic-style swirls and patterns carved into wood.

→ We liked this portrait of a brewer, and wondered why we don’t see more of these on social media:

And here is Nigel, the brewer at @KelhamBrewery, who very kindly offered me a tour of the place. 🙂 pic.twitter.com/uFBwH9fX0Y

— Robin LeBlanc, from work (@TheThirstyWench) May 23, 2014

→ And, finally, the first two reviews of Brew Britannia arrived this week, from Nick Mitchell, and from The Beer Nut on behalf of Beoir.