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News, Nuggets and #Beerylongreads 28/11/2014

Don’t be alarmed: you haven’t lost track of the day of the week or time of day. Because tomorrow has been set aside for our #Beerylongreads post about Adnams, we’re springing our weekly round-up of news a day early.

→ Hop merchants Charles Faram have published their 2014 hop report for the northern hemisphere: ‘The crop has not been bad this year and although we will have shortages with certain varieties things could have been a lot worse.’ Phew!

→ After an off-hand Tweet got shared fairly widely (sorry!) Lars Marius Garshol has written at greater length about why he was troubled by a Barcelona bar with no local beer:

In one way it’s perfectly understandable that Latvians and Catalans want to drink foreign beers. I often do, too, in Oslo. But why should visiting foreigners seemingly prefer these beers? If their ratings are anything to go by, that’s what they do. And why should it be exactly the same breweries all over Europe? It’s always the same 3-4 Norwegian, Danish and UK brewers. The world of craft beer is a lot bigger than that.

→ Mark Hailwood’s series of blog posts on alehouse characters, tied into the publication of his book Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England, has reached its third instalment with ‘The Wastrel Husband’.

→ We’re not sure we agree with the overall generalisation that the brewing industry is friendly but Pete Brissenden (aka the Beer Soaked Boy) continues his run of great form with a post that gives some concrete evidence to support the claim:

I got put in charge of the dispense installation, troubleshooting, budgeting, maintenance and training people to lineclean at the brewery I was working at. I knew a little, but not all that much about it. I sent a quick email off to Derek Prentice at Fullers explaining my situation and the next week I spent four days shadowing one of their install engineers and one of their cellar inspection guys. They didn’t have to do that for me, Fullers had nothing to directly gain from it, but they did it and it helped immeasurably.

→ From New Scientist (via @JamesBSumner) news of important research which has shown that a good head of foam helps prevent beer from splashing out of the glass.

→ To mark Movember, Glasgow University Archives dug out this corking image of a brewery founder and his facial adornment (via @robsterowski):

→ On Facebook, we’ve been wondering about a format for talking about beer.