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News, Nuggets & Longreads 18/10/2014

Pint of beer illustration.

“Ha ha, bacon, ha ha, all the bacon, ha ha, it’s funny how people keep mentioning bacon! Bacon o’clock! Hahahahahahahaha! BACON! Hrr, hrr. Bacon. Yeah. Bacon.” Yeah, hilarious. Here are some links.

→ A potentially interesting development: Justin Mason and Ed Razzall have been working together on a beer guide for East Anglia.

→ Ten Inch Wheeler, who is handy with words as he is with a camera, recounts a pub crawl from East London to Marylebone:

Telegraph Man wants to know if Yorkshire will go for devolution if Scotland separates. A pure Bradford boom-voice declares that they should have marched on Downing Street after the end of the Tour De France. Big laughs.

→ Finding fresh things to say about familiar territory, and fresh ways to express it, the ever-readable Beer Nut explores Bamberg and the surrounding area in several instalments: 1 | 2 | 3

→ Saved to Pocket: long-running technology magazine Wired has a piece on exactly how Halve Maan plan to run a pipeline for beer under the medieval heritage-protected city of Bruges.

→ Martyn ‘Zythophile’ Cornell marked yesterday’s 200th anniversary of London’s Great Beer Flood by reminding us, first, that a lot of the stories are simply made up, and, secondly, that real people really died.

→ We love reading J. Kenji López-Alt’s painstaking ‘Food Lab’ articles at Serious Eats this cassoulet recipe, based on extensive research, is great. Is there a beer equivalent of his work? Someone should get on that, if not.

Special supplement

Purely for the record, and in case you missed them, this week’s controversies, contrived or otherwise:

CAMRA’s sexist leaflet: original petition | commentary by Rowan Molyneux, with extensive discussion | commentary by It Comes in Pints?  Part 1 and Part 2 | commentary by Pete Brown | and one of several heated discussions on Facebook.

→ Just as the Great British Beer Festival has tended to do, the Independent Manchester Beer Convention has triggered a round of soul-searching and (mostly civilised) argument: Phil didn’t go because he didn’t like the look of it; Tandleman agreed with some of Phil’s observations, but generally gave IndyMan the thumbs-up; Richard at the Beercast wondered whether they might not both have a point about elitism; and Emma at Crema’s Beer Odyssey gave voice to the irritation of dedicated IndyMänner.

→ Over the Atlantic, there’s been a brouhaha over so-called ‘pay-to-play’ — that is, bigger breweries bribing their way on the counters of bars at the expense of smaller breweries. The best summary, with links out, is Jeff Alworth’s — part 1 and part 2. (Beer geeks love a conspiracy theory.)

→ And, finally, GQ fished for web traffic by giving chef David Chang to have a pop at craft beer. Beer geeks were outraged, as was the intention. GQ fished for a bit more attention by letting Brooklyn’s brewmaster Garrett Oliver respond the next day. Annoying as this kind of contrived ‘Brad slams Angelina’s ex’ nonsense is, there’s no denying Oliver’s rhetorical talents — his piece is very funny.

Brew Britannia Business

→ Aaron Stein at Whatchudrinkin? has written a few posts referencing Brew Britannia, and, in particular, comparing the UK and US experience, including this one about ‘rich old dudes’.

→ And Beer writer Tim Hampson says…

5 replies on “News, Nuggets & Longreads 18/10/2014”

Wow! If you get awarded a metal umlaut for going to the Indy Man Beer Con then I’ll have to swap sides on this one – it clearly was The Greatest British Beer Festival In The World Ever!

Blimey O’Reilly! I hadn’t seen that blog post – for some reason the links to my post haven’t shown up at my blog.

Obviously I don’t want to continue the argument here… so I’ll shut up.

Am I the only one who finds it weird reading all this “pay-to-play” stuff from this side of the Atlantic? From the first Beervana link:
“Ever heard the term ‘committed lines’? This is what it means. Breweries buy draft lines so their lame beers aren’t irrelevant.”
and from the comments:
“I have heard about bars here in Colorado having “committed lines” where they only stock beers from a certain distributor”
both sound fairly strange as bits of shock-horror if you’ve grown up with tied houses and pubcos!

And if it’s even half true then the comment to the effect that it’d be suicidally bad for business to stock anything but the best possible beers also suggests a bit of a difference between the US and UK beer scenes…

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