Category Archives: Blogging and writing

Long Articles About Beer for May 2013

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Cain's brewery logo

1. ‘Cain’s: the final chapter?’  and ‘Chapter 9: Full Circle’ by Chris Routledge

Routledge wrote Cain’s: the Story of Liverpool in a Pint and has followed the ups and downs of the brewery under the Dusanj brothers throughout the last decade. Now, as it looks as if it might finally be on its last legs, he offers a sort-of-insider’s view of the current crisis (actually not that long…) which is best read alongside the chapter from his 2008 book to which it refers.

Richard Marx

2. ‘Right Here Waiting’ by Edward McLelland

We found this through either Longreads or Longform — we can’t remember which — and enjoyed it for two reasons: first, because it’s a funny story about a journalist winding up a touchy local celebrity but, secondly, and more importantly, because of the lovely pen portrait of a Chicago bar and the universal struggle to become ‘a regular’.

Truman's ales sign, East London.

3. ‘When Brick Lane was Home to the Biggest Brewery in the World’ by Martyn Cornell

The king of the longform beer article doesn’t really do short. This piece tells the story of Truman, Hanbury & Buxton and its colossal ‘Black Eagle’ brewery in the East End of London from beginning (1683?) to today.

Brewdog bottle label.

4. ‘Byron, Brewdog, and the recuperation of radical aesthetics’ by Jonathan Moses

Moses is a left-wing political activist and teacher and so has an interesting perspective on Brewdog and what he calls their ‘aversion to association with the corporate market’.

Pub saved by irony

5. ‘The Pub That Was Saved by Irony’ by The Gentle Author (Spitalfields Life)

How an architectural heritage museum wanted to demolish a Victorian pub, and the campaign to save it, juxtaposed with the memories of George Barker who grew up in the Marquis of Lansdowne before World War II.

We read articles like this using Pocket. Beer writers and bloggers: why not stretch out and write something loooooooong?

More Dregs from the Drip Tray

Truman's London Stout.

These are a few bits and pieces that didn’t warrant a blog post of their own.

  • Mini book review: Beers of Britain by Warren Knock and Conal Gregory (1975). This oddity was recommended by Michael ‘Beer Hunter’ Jackson in the intro to his book The English Pub in 1976. A slim paperback, it takes the odd approach of reviewing pubs by region in prose, rather than, Good Beer Guide style, with alphabetical entries. Worth reading for (a) an informed but view that isn’t CAMRA propaganda; (b) to find out what beer in your town was like forty years ago; and (c) for the occasional nugget, e.g. St Austell didn’t pasteurise their keg bitter in the seventies. A little dry for our tastes, though.
  • An account of election time in the eighteen-thirties, from Recollections of Old Taunton by Edward Goldsworth (1883): ‘The elections in Taunton were a disgrace to all England. The first candidate’s arrival was made known by several hogsheads of beer being rolled on the Parade. It was then drawn off in buckets, pitchers, and jugs, and most of it consumed on the spot; the effect of which was soon both audible and visible, by singing, shouting, swearing, and fighting among the men, and screaming, cap-tearing and hair-pulling by the women… The second candidate would do as the first, and in addition would issue tickets for obtaining beer at public houses…’ As a result, when asked by the Poll Clerk how he had decided who to vote for, a local called Simon Duffer replied: ‘I hear they gives away the most beer.’
  • We were pondering the ages of CAMRA chairs in the early days. We don’t know how old Chris Holmes or James Lynch were, but the first, Michael Hardman, was 25 when he took the job in 1971. Christopher Hutt (1973) was 26. Gordon Massey (1974) was 27. Chris Bruton (1976) was 31, as was his sucessor Joe Goodwin (1979). Tim Amsden (1980) was 29. When did CAMRA last have a chair under the age of 35? It would take a pretty ambitious character to pull it off today.
  • You all saw this long post we wrote on West Country brewers Starkey, Knight & Ford, didn’t you? Good. Just checking.
  • We’ve been posting some things which are too short to blog but too long to Tweet over on Facebook, by the way.

Book Review: Craft Beer World

Detail of Mark Dredge's book Craft Beer World.

The market for lists of ‘beers to drink before you die’ is crowded — are there reasons to choose Mark ‘Pencil and Spoon’ Dredge’s offer over any other?

If you’re just starting to take an interest in beer, it’s useful to have a more experienced friend who can point you in the right direction until you start to form your own opinions. If that friend happens to have similar tastes to you then all the better. If you’re a real ale drinker who wants to explore, then Roger Protz has you covered; if you are fundamentally turned off by the very idea of real ale culture, then Dredge is your man.

Some people will find this book annoying. They’ll roll their eyes at suggestions America is the beating heart of craft beer, and that hops ‘only really got exciting in the 1970s’ when American brewers worked out how to get the best from them. They’ll be rubbed the wrong way by food and drink pairing suggestions, and by the focus on big beers over everyday ‘drinkers’. They are not the market for this book and probably shouldn’t read it for the sake of their blood pressure. Dredge has, and has always had, a distinct voice, loved by some, sneered at by others, but certainly not ‘vanilla’. Read his blog before you buy the book and you’ll know what to expect.

Having said that, from our perspective, there is probably not enough Dredge in the book. There are photos of beer labels and bottles, but not many of him and his drinking buddies on their exciting sounding travels. (Jamie Oliver would not miss this trick…) Occasionally, he sets the scene for when and where a particular beer was consumed –  the entry on Crate Brewery Lager, for example — and we’d have liked more.

Even though we’re got our own opinions on beer, and no longer need the ‘beginner’s guide’ asides, we did get something out of this book, as we’ve tried very few of the beers Dredge recommends. We won’t be carrying it round with us everywhere we go, as we did with our first Michael Jackson pocket guide, but we’ve made mental notes of a few brews and will keep an eye out for them on our travels.

We were also interested in his customised style classification system — descriptive rather than prescriptive — which acknowledges the emergence of, for example, ‘pale and hoppy session beer’ and ‘Pacific pale ale’ as recognisable categories. IPA is at the centre of his view of ‘craft beer’ and so almost every variation thereon — e.g. ‘Belgian IPA’ — gets its own sub-style. This is an honest reflection of what’s going on, like it or not, and makes sense to us.

If there is a bouncy twenty-something in your life who is just beginning to take an interest in beer, this might be the perfect birthday or Christmas present.

Disclosure: we were sent a free copy of this book by the publishers, Dog’n'Bone, and this blog gets a mention in the ‘learn more’ section at the back.

The Stale Language of Beer

Two glasses of beer.

This guest post on Sophie Atherton’s blog is interesting for several reasons. First, because Ms. Woolgar, not being a fully-fledged beer geek, seems to have been able to react honestly to the beers she tasted without the fog of hype clouding her vision. Secondly, because of some of the language she uses to describe flavour and aroma:

  • a hint of Maltesers
  • a fresh, zesty lemon mousse aroma
  • a slight toasted cumin flavour
  • mustard and cress
  • blue cheese.

That refreshingly original vocabulary, apparently based on gut feeling, is a pleasure to read.

A lot of people, us included, write about beer using words and terms largely informed by Michael ‘Beer Hunter’ Jackson, Roger Protz, and others in that lineage. People will describe ‘horse blanket’ when they really mean ‘that thing you get in that other beer that Michael Jackson said had a horse blanket character’. Who, apart from Adrian Tierney-Jones, has actually smelled a horse blanket? Seriously?

The same goes for ‘styles’. The established style framework has its uses, we think, but Alan is right to ask why there aren’t any/many alternatives. New ways of cutting the deck can be revealing, even if they ultimately fail. For example, we’ve been enjoying and pondering upon Tandleman’s distinction between beers for ‘supping’ and those for ‘sipping’. An entire classification system could be worked up from that — one that reflects the question of ‘sessionability’ while recognising that carbonation, bitterness, balance, and intensity of flavour are arguably as important as alcoholic strength.

The Challenge of Objectivity

Detail from a Watneys Red Beer Mat.

As we start lining up interviews with the current generation of British brewers, rather than those in retirement, we find ourselves reflecting on what we can do to make sure our book remains objective. We’re interested in them because they’re part of a bigger story, not because we think they’re awesome. What we don’t want to do is parrot their PR, puff them up, or get drawn into fawning. (Under an awning..?) There’s plenty of that about already.

We’ve already had our objectivity tested a couple of times. One of the things we are determined to avoid is merely repeating the established CAMRA mythology — ‘we saved beer’ — which has been polished to a sheen with years of repetition, but it’s hard when you speak to founder members and early activists not to get swept up in the excitement of it all. That’s especially true when they are nice fellers, and you’re sharing a pint.

What’s working so far, we think, is asking challenging questions, without malice, and as politely as possible.

It is also helpful to speak to ‘the enemy’. A chap who worked in PR for a big brewery in the seventies was very helpful in giving an alternative view of CAMRA in its heyday. We’ve also managed to dig out a few contemporary articles which set out how the Big Six felt about CAMRA at the time. (They didn’t like it.) It’s a shame that we missed the chance to grill E.C. ‘Ted’ Handel, head of PR at Watney’s in the early seventies, though.

What we need to do, for balance, is find the modern equivalent of Mr Handel — someone from AB-Inbev or Diageo perhaps — and ask them what they think of CAMRA and the current craft beer boom. But what would be in it for them?

Hopostrophes

Table from a Institute of Brewing Journal, 1983.

By Bailey

I once wrote the language style guide for a large organisation but I didn’t get chance to come up with advice on writing about hops. Now seems like a good time to put that right. As usual with questions of style (grammar’s wishy-washy, let-it-all-hang-out cousin) this is slightly more complicated than it ought to be.

1. The names of hop varieties should be capitalised. Most older varieties are named after places or people (Goldings, Fuggles) and many newer ones are trademarks, and so ought to be capitalised. For consistency, it makes sense to capitalise all of them, all of the time.

2. Older hop varieties named after people or places tend, historically, to be written as if they were plurals. This might be because they were once possessives which have lost their apostrophes — should it be Golding’s, just as the variety of apple is Laxton’s Superb? Or do we accept that, as with the Nags [sic] Head, it is too late to be correcting typos? My view is that to attempt to overturn this tradition would be churlish. So, Fuggles and Goldings it is.

3. Except, of course, in the case of Whitbread Golding Variety (WGV) which is definitely not Whitbread Goldings Variety.

4. American hops which have been around for a long while cause confusion: should they be given names which echo Goldings and Fuggles? The Journal of the Institute of Brewing referred, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, to Clusters (with S, an old variety) and Cascade (without, relatively modern). They also suggest Super Styrians, perhaps because they were seen as part of the same family as Styrian Goldings. That seems a good example to follow.

5. New hops varieties are rarely, if ever, pluralised: writing Sorachi Aces, Citras, Mosaics and Danas seems outright barbarous.

6. Hops from non-English speaking countries which are commonly referred to using, e.g., German or Czech names should not be pluralised as if they were English words: ‘Saazs’ seems silly (zeems zilly). Hallertau is a variety in its own right; but sub-varieties from the Hallertau region are, e.g., Hallertauer Magnum.

7. A general rule, then: don’t stick an S on the end of the name of a hop variety unless it is Fuggles, Goldings, Super Styrians or Clusters.

The brewer added generous amounts of Cascade in the first batch. By the time of the second brew, the recipe had been revised, and on that occasion used equally generous amounts of Goldings and Clusters, with a touch of Citra.

No Beer in the Archives, Please

Because beer and pubs aren’t, frankly, seen as terribly important (example…), lots of their history is depressingly poorly documented.

Everyone knows that Michael Young, later Baron Young of Dartington, described CAMRA in ‘the mid-seventies’ as ‘Europe’s most successful consumer movement’, right? But how do we know this? Because, from the late-seventies, it entered CAMRA folklore, and got repeated endlessly.

But how do we know he really said it? If he did, what were his exact words, in what context? We think we’ve pinned down the time and place — at the 1976 National Consumer Congress in Birmingham, on 17 September that year — but trying to find an official record is proving difficult. The National Consumer Council doesn’t exist any more and no-one at its successor organisation recalls seeing papers from as far back as the seventies in the archive. They were, we suspect, thrown in a skip during an office move.

All we have, so far, is this tantalising clue from coverage of the event by The Times:

Many agreed that they could best achieve their aims by working together, but a representative from CAMRA said his organisation had only been successful because it had adopted an entirely self-interested position.

Then there’s the radio programme on which members of the CAMRA National Executive appeared in the early seventies. After much digging, we have worked out when it was broadcast and on which station (BBC Radio London, in around May 1973, as part of the Platform strand) but no recording exists in the BBC’s collection (‘there was no policy of archiving output until much later’). We’d love to hear it, not least because John Young of Young’s Brewery, a fascinating character, was also on the panel.

Not everything can be preserved, we know that, but it’s sad that moments like these, almost in reach, and which played out in front of cameras and tape recorders, seem to have disappeared.

Book Review: The Lost Beers & Breweries of Britain

Beer label: Fremlins County Ale

We covet Brian Glover’s experience almost as much as we envy his library.

This 160-page ‘trade’ paperback tells the story of fifty beers and/or breweries that no longer exist. The author, whose 1988 New Beer Guide is one of our go-to research texts, is a CAMRA veteran and long-time beer writer and so, in many cases, is able to draw on his own recollections, or those of acquaintances, such as CAMRA-founder Graham Lees. (The latter recalls drinking Chester’s ‘Fighting Mild’ as a 13-year-old and finding it ‘dark, hoppy and lip-smacking’.)

The Lost Beers & Breweries of Britain by Brian Glover.Where he doesn’t have first-hand experience of a particular beer, he turns to newspaper articles (he seems to have read all of them, ever) and what seems to be a particularly complete collection of brewery publications. We’ve got a few of the easy-to-find ones — Whitbread, Watney, and so on — but Glover’s years spent digging in second-hand bookshops means that he is able to refer, for example, to Seventy Years and More, an official history of the Barnsley Brewery published in 1960, as well as various beer mats, leaflets, labels and advertisements.

While certainly no coffee-table book, it is also generously illustrated, with 32 pages of colour illustrations (mostly beer labels and posters) and many more in black-and-white.

Whether you enjoy this book as much as we did will depend upon your appetite for nostalgia, but even those who prefer to live in the now might find inspiration here: Meat Stout is surely due a revival, and why do more Yorkshire breweries not make a ‘Stingo’? The story of the oddity that was Davenport’s ‘beer at home’ — delivered to the doorstep by float, done for by supermarkets — reminds us that entire business models are also waiting to be rediscovered in the age of the ‘veg box’.

Any complaints? As ever, we’d love footnotes and a bibliography, but sources are cited throughout, and the claims about the development of IPA — fast becoming the test of any beer book’s mettle — seem sound to us. (But we stand ready to be corrected if some subtlety has escaped us.) And, in contrast to Chris Arnot’s very similarly titled hardback, also published last year, there is perhaps a little too much emphasis on dates and details at the expense of people and stories.

That’s nitpicking, though. We expect to spend many years dipping into this book until it falls apart, and recommend it highly.

The value of silly beer

Willy Wonka who, sadly, never made beer.

Who’s for Everlasting Beer?

There are some who argue that high-concept beers are, at best, pointless and, at worst, damaging to The Culture of Beer. For our part, though we rarely drink them and certainly don’t make much of an effort to seek them out, we sometimes find the ideas behind them funny, and feel, ultimately, that they have their place.

Within a given brewery’s range, silly beers can play the same role as the concept car, or those catwalk clothes that prompt people to say: “You’d never actually wear it out in a million years, would you?” They make a statement about values; they speak to the skill and imagination of the brewer; and they create buzz. Often, they’re impossible to find in the real world and prohibitively expensive when they do turn up, but that doesn’t really matter — it’s all about the halo effect. “I heard something about this brewery! Their head brewer is a genius!” says the consumer, and then chooses that brand of perfectly nice bitter or lager over another.

For drinkers, the benefit of such beers is negligible, though perhaps ingredients or techniques from the CRAZY!!! beer might help the brewer level up, and thus influence for the better something more mainstream they brew down the line. If you’re the kind of drinker afflicted with the need to ponder your pint, however, then WACKY!!! beers provide much needed input: the opportunity to be outraged; to question what beer is; and to articulate what exactly it is you do want.

Is thinking and talking about beer a good thing? If it helps to prevent a slow sleepwalk into monopoly and across-the-board blandness, then the answer is probably yes.

We were prompted to think about this by Elizabeth David who, in her book Italian Food, mentions the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti and his proto-Heston Blumenthal ‘futurist food’ manifesto.

Beer Books: Shakespeare’s Local

The George Inn, Southwark.

Illustration from Walks In London Vol. 1, c.1896.

Talking to publishers about beer books, you quickly learnt that there’s one writer they think has really nailed it in commercial terms: Pete Brown. They like his ‘high concept’, ‘pitchable’ approach; they like his titles; and most of all, they love the fact that his books appeal to ‘normals’ as much as they do to beer geeks.

Shakespeare’s Local is yet another step towards the mainstreaming of both Brown and beer, though, in fact, beer is hardly mentioned at all and even the pub of the title isn’t always centre-stage so much as it’s used as a lens through which to view London at various periods in its history.

It tells the story of the George Inn, Southwark — these days a tourist attraction, tourist trap, after work City hangout and chain pub, but long associated with Olde London, Shakespeare and Dickens.

The opening is reminiscent of — bear with us — a ‘history episode’ of Hartnell-era Doctor Who; a Powell and Pressburger film; one of those nostalgic shorts from Roll Out the Barrel; and a nineteen-eighties text adventure we really want to play: “April the nineteenth in the Year of Our Lord 1737… You quickly scan the front page news of shipping list on its way to the colonies and elsewhere…”

> TAKE TANKARD
> DRINK BEER
> GO EAST

The portrayal of the relationship between Southwark and the City of London is excellent and, throughout, there’s a sense of virtual reality — of being there, in the time and place described with carefully chosen details in 3D, surround-sound, smell-o-vision. We came away with a list of places to visit, things to see and things to look out for.

It made us laugh out loud here and there, too — a quality not to be undervalued.

It’s not perfect. With our mortarboards and scholarly gowns on, we regret the lack of footnotes, and wouldn’t cite it as a source in a Phd paper; but, on the other hand, in holiday reading mode, we found a few passages where Brown has, in publishing parlance, ‘been too generous to his research’, and so caught ourselves skimming. (Yes, that’s right — he can’t win.)

On the whole, though, it is a great read and (with a few shopping days to go…) the perfect gift for anyone in your family with a passing interest in London, history, pubs, architecture, the heritage industry, highwaymen, public transport or lewd poetry.

The single pub micro-history could become an interesting sub-genre: here’s a nice piece on a pub in Croydon by Kake.