Archive for the ‘Blogging and writing’ Category

If we send one person to Unterzaunsbach…

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

We note there’s been a fair bit of introspection recently in the blogoshire.

A comment on one of our recent posts reminds us of one reason why we do it.

Mike004 doesn’t say in his comment whether he went to Unterzaunsbach because we recommended it, but we do like the fact that, if you Google it, we’re on the first page of results.

Equally, our recent series of posts on Passau may not have set the world on fire in terms of comments, but, before we went on holiday, we struggled find much online to guide us. Hopefully, we’ve done something to help fill that gap and map (sort of) unknown territory for future beer explorers.

Mike004 also pointed out that Peschl stopped brewing in 2008. What on Earth were we drinking if not Peschl? We are confused and would be grateful for any intelligence.

iPod/iPhone: handy on holiday

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

We interrupt our series of posts on the breweries of Passau for this announcement.

If you’ve got an iPod Touch or iPhone, we can’t recommend highly enough the excellent foreign language dictionaries available as apps from Ultralingua. The German-English dictionary is very comprehensive and helped us decipher several complicated menus in pubs and restaurants on our recent trip.

The beer specific apps aren’t always the most essential for beer geeks, it turns out.

A certain I don’t know what

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Sometimes, however carefully and accurately you describe something, you just can’t capture what it is that makes it great. Yes, Abraham Lincoln was a tall man with a beard who wore a black hat, but, factual as that description is, it somehow misses the point.

A few times recently, we’ve described the general characteristics of a beer and realised that they could apply to a thousand other brews. We’ve had to resort to words like ‘zing’ to get across an additional, elusive quality that makes that particular beer great.

Is it freshness? A quality of carbonation? Subtle flavours which more refined palates than ours could identify? We don’t know and, until such time as we do, ‘zing’ will have to do.

It’s only beer

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

Does anyone else get fed up of being told “it’s only beer” and not to take it too seriously?

Most people with hobbies know that the subject of their interest isn’t that important in the great scheme of things. Global financial crisis, climate change, careers, family — those are serious.

In our case, beer is something in which we’ve chosen to indulge our interest just seriously enough to occupy a few of the spare hours when we’re not worrying about all that other stuff.

We take lots of other things just as seriously, too — Bubble Bobble, the Beatles, curry, spaghetti westerns….

What’s the point of a hobby if you don’t thrown yourself into it?

Who cares about accuracy?

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Graham Wheeler, who wrote a book of homebrew recipes with famous beer writer Roger Protz, jumped into a comment thread over at Ron’s blog recently to defend his sometime collaborator. Ron was being a bit sarky about Roger’s apparent wilingness to trot out stories about beer which have been largely discredited. Graham’s argument seems to be (heavily paraphrased):

  • professional writers are too busy and skint to be accurate and
  • no-one but weirdos and nerds care about accuracy anyway — accuracy doesn’t sell to the man in the street.

Would any professional writers out there agree with that?

When we were starting out learning about beer, we bought one of Roger’s books and enjoyed it, but we were working on the assumption that he was at least trying to be accurate.

Stonch’s Beer Blog

Monday, January 4th, 2010

We decided to start blogging after a particularly exciting trip around Bavaria in 2007. The first thing we did when we got home was checked out what was already there and Stonch’s Beer Blog was top of the search results and a massive inspiration.

It’s always been one of the first blogs we look at each day, although we usually chicken out of joining the sometimes heated debates in the comments threads. We’ve only enjoyed it more in recent months as it gave us a glimpse into a world we didn’t know well — that of the pub landlord — in a way which demystified it and even made it sound like fun.

Now it seems the blog is winding up, we can only say that we’ll miss it and that we hope a Gunmakers blog might follow soon so at least we’ll know what beers to expect when we pop in.

Knut, the Gunmakers, and our latest jaunt

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

We spent yesterday evening at the Gunmakers (Jeff’s pub) with Knut Albert, the noted Norwegian beer blogger.

We enjoyed a couple of pints of Purity Mad Goose (a golden yellow beer in Jaipur/Hophead territory) and Caledonian Double Dark Oatmeal stout (sweetish and mild) and some top notch grub, too — Jeff’s not being big headed when he suggests the food at his place is quality stuff.

As well as putting up with a lot of inane questions about Scandinavia, Knut was also able to reassure us that Hamburg, where we’re spending Friday and Saturday night, is not a complete dump as Lonely Planet would have you believe. We’re in Brussels tonight, although getting in late, and then in Luebeck on Wednesday and Thursday nights.

We’ll let you know if we find any beer of note when we return next week.

New comments on old posts

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

couragebristol

We get the occasional comment on old posts, usually where people have stumbled across them through Googling a specific term.

For example, because we’re one of the few sites online to even mention Starkey, Knight and Ford (a defunct West Country brewery) we’ve had some interesting comments from people with memories to share and questions to ask. Amongst the recent comments, Jon Rose asks if anyone remembers his grandad, Bill, who used to drive steam traction engines for SKF, and David Harper recalls living next door to the brewery as a child. There is also a debate brewing about the colour of SKF Chairman Tommy Ford’s car…

Quite a few people have commented on an old post about another defunct brewery, Truman, Hanbury and Buxton. Most of them are involved in family history projects and are trying to trace people who worked at the brewery or ran Truman pubs. If you’ve got any connection with or knowledge of THB, why not have a look and see if you can help them out?

One of earliest posts was a recipe for Lithuanian delicacy Kepta Duona. In the last couple of years, a few people (including some genuine Lithuanians) have dropped in to say that they think our recipe sucks and to suggest much-needed improvements. On a related note, it was also nice of Jo to report back on her success with our pretzel recipe, and Petr is of course right when he points out that we should have included garlic in our nakladaný hermelin marinade.

We also enjoyed a recent addition to our post about sparklers, which we wrote after our first trip to York. Simo is a professional bar manager who concludes that: “The argument will continue but the reality is that no sparkler means a flat pint, the reality is that southerners would rather have a flat full pint cause they are tight wads.” We had a little chuckle at that.

Of course, there are also the borderline spam comments, too, like the one we got this week from an off-licence owner pretending to be a punter — “Found a great store with a fantastic range of American beer on the Holloway Road!”. We’d have approved it if he’d just said: “I own a really good off licence, here’s the address in case your readers are interested”.

The picture has nothing to do with the post but we’ve got to do something with all our shots of old brewery livery. This is a Courage logo on the side of a former estate pub (now a cafe) in Bristol.

Rants and eulogies

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

Pete Brown has written a superb rant about the many headed beer industry. Read it here.

And then, for something completely different, a nice pair of posts on Pencil and Spoon, one where Mark writes about his long suffering missus, and then the right of reply from the long suffering missus herself.  Other long-suffering beer widows have commented.

This could run and run.

Why landlords go for the usual suspects

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

With people like Jeff (aka Stonch) of the Gunmakers Arms and Dave from the Woolpack blogging, we’re getting some great insights into the life of the pub landlord.

Jeff’s recent post about the benefits to the landlord of sticking to the usual suspects made us feel chastened, as it’s something we’ve moaned about in the past. In short, he points out (whilst gallantly naming no names) that some of the smaller breweries don’t deliver good quality product.

We’ve seen that in bottles, too, so it doesn’t surprise us. Given that we all root for these small businesses, should we be helping them out by letting them know when we’ve had a dodgy bottle, or would that just wind them up?