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News, Nuggets and Longreads 23 February 2019: Mindfulness, Kulture, Flagships

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that grabbed our attention in the past week, from racism to Belgian burglars.

This week’s big viral piece was by Toni Canada for Kulture and issued a challenge on the subject of of race in (primarily the American) beer scene:

The craft beer community swears it isn’t racist, but the disparity in the amount of visibility, public concern, and outrage given to issues offending white craft beer drinkers versus those concerning black folks tells a different story.

(But a note: we had seen the Founder’s news, were following the story, and felt as if it got decent coverage at, e.g., VinePair. Which stories shouldn’t have been written or shared to make more room for more on this?)


Barley

Deep in the technical weeds, Andreas Krennmair has written a fascinating piece on ‘Why a Triple Decoction Mash Can Never Fail’:

[When] bringing your decoctions to a boil, they will partially, if not mostly, convert, and then release more starch during the boil, which will then be fully converted in the main mash. There are two decoctions where the enzymes get into the right temperature range to convert starch into sugar, and there are two rest steps where the enzymes have even more time to convert more starch into sugar. Your whole mash goes through the right temperature so many times, it will eventually be fully converted. And to get into these right temperature ranges, all you need to do is follow a few simple principles. And if you want, you could even do this totally without a thermometer.

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breweries News pubs

News, Nuggets and Longreads 16 February 2019: Beer Duty, BridgePort, Brussels

Here’s everything in writing about beer and pubs from the past week that struck as especially noteworthy, from colonialism to brewery closures.

For the Guardian Dutch journalist Olivier van Beemen offers an article based on an extract from his book Heineken in Africa: a Multinational Unleashed. It offers a glimpse into the practices of a European brewing giant operating in Africa, and how, despite the rhetoric of corporate social responsibility, it cannot help but echo the behaviours of the colonial era:

Further research [into promotion girls] in DRC, the country where the most abuse was reported, revealed that unwanted advances came not only from customers but also from Heineken staff. “The enormous uncertainty of keeping a job combined with the absence of employee rights of legal status makes PW [promotion women] vulnerable for misuse from several stakeholders,” the internal report notes. Often, the women, who earned very little, had to sleep with managers if they wanted to keep their job. But if they needed to see a gynaecologist or get an abortion, which was often illegal and dangerous, they had to sort everything themselves, and pay for it. They also had to drink five to 10 large bottles of beer every working day, in order to persuade customers to consume more.


Sighing bar staff.

This week’s big viral story, for quite understandable reasons, was this expression of righteous fury by Canadian beer writer Robin LeBlanc in response to a bizarre sexist ramble in an American brewing magazine by its publishers, Bill Metzger, who has since resigned:

That’s right, folks. He managed to take a piece about cask ale and turn it into a whiny, self-indulgent, sexist, heavily misogynist, and creepy as hell work. In fact he did this so expertly that it actually broke my brain and I need to break it down and go over most of the particularly offensive quotes with you all because if I don’t I’m going to keep thinking about it until I have a brain aneurysm.

Alright. Let’s start with the very first sentence of the article.

“Like most men, I struggle with my my primal self.”

Oh boy, strap in folks, because we know exactly where this is going.


De la Senne beers in Brussels.

For Brussels Beer City Eoghan Walsh provides a rundown of the history of cult Belgian brewery de la Senne, constructing his tale around five specific beers:

Before there was Brasserie de la Senne, there was Zinnebir. Bernard Leboucq was home-brewing in the basement of a central Brussels squat in 2002, and he was invited to brew Zinnebir as the official beer for that year’s Zinneke parade. Yvan De Baets, already passionate about beer, was a social worker working alongside youth groups on the parade. A meet-cute was inevitable.

“I saw this guy pulling a big trolley of beer,” says De Baets, “and I told the guys working with me to take care of the kids, I have to meet him. He offered me a beer, a second, a third.” Two years later De Baets joined Leboucq as unofficial brewing advisor in their first iteration of Brasserie de la Senne.


The Quest for the Perfect Pub

The Pub Curmudgeon has dissected a largely forgotten book from 1989 in which brother Nick and Charlie Hurt report on a three-month Quest for the Perfect Pub:

The thirty years since the book was published have, not surprisingly, not been kind to the pubs listed. Some, fortunately, are still in existence in little-changed form, such as the Yew Tree at Cauldon in Staffordshire and the Traveller’s Rest at Alpraham in Cheshire. Others, such as the Stagg at Titley in Herefordshire and the Durham Ox at Shrewley in Warwickshire, have very much gone down the gastro route and can no longer be regarded as community boozers, while many, such as the Horse & Jockey at Delph in the former Saddleworth district of Yorkshire and the White Lion at Pen-y-Mynydd in Flintshire have long since closed. Indeed, I doubt whether either of those long survived the publication of the book, and the Horse & Jockey has long been a roofless, crumbling ruin.


Abstract illustration of pubs.

Roger Protz has written an interesting piece about the specific issues faced by those running houses owned by giant pub companies:

“My agreement meant I could buy wines, spirits and minerals free of tie but I was tied for beer and cider. The main Ei beer list had Dark Star Hophead. Jack had sold three 18 gallon casks a week of Hophead but Ei said I couldn’t have it as it was outside SIBA’s delivery area – SIBA has a 25-mile radius for beer orders.”

Courage Best is a popular beer among regulars. Harry found he would have to pay £30 a barrel more than Jack had paid – and Jack had sold 100 barrels a year.


Carling Black Label beer mat.

At Ed’s Beer Site Ed provides some fascinating details of how Carling lager is actually brewed:

Very high maltose syrup is used in the kettle to give 20% of the grist. For those not familiar with high gravity brewing very high maltose syrup is important because it reduces the amount of esters produced during fermentation, something which high gravity brewing raises.


Jim at Beers Manchester is angry about the weaselly ways of the UK’s larger breweries which are lobbying for changes to Progressive Beer Duty from behind the facades of various organisations, such as the Independent Family Brewers of Britain:

Let’s look at the IFBB in more detail.

Richard Fuller. Secretary of The Independent Family Brewers of Britain.

Hang on. Fuller. As in that brewery that is no longer “Independent”? Hmmm.


A notable brewery closure: BridgePort Brewing of Portland, Oregon – one of the first of the modern IPA brewers, launching its flagship hoppy pale beer in 1996 – is shutting up shop after 35 years. Jeff Allworth offers context and commentary here.


And finally, from Twitter:

For more links see Stan Hieronymus’s blog on Mondays and Alan McLeod’s on Thursdays.

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News

News, Nuggets and Longreads 9 February 2019: London, Chuvashia, Viborg

Here’s everything that struck us as especially interesting in the world of beer and pubs in the past week, from the origins of craft beer to best practice in bars.

A couple of years ago we put together a short history of beer weeks with input from Will Hawkes, then involved in organising London Beer Week. Now, Will has written his own piece revealing just how much stress and work was involved, and for how little reward:

It had all been a terrible error. I should have known that I was doing something very stupid before I started; I’d asked around to see if anyone else in the London beer demi-monde was interested in helping, and got a series of responses along the lines of “Good idea! No, sorry, I’m too busy,” generally from people with enough time to be discussing the idea with me in a pub in mid-afternoon… Not only that, but I was never really sure why I was doing it: it just sort of kept on happening, for four long years.


For The Takeout Kate Bernot writes about the experience of drinking out as a woman, and how much she appreciates concrete steps taken by bars to make women feel safe:

The Rhino bar in Missoula, where I live, has posted flyers indicating its bartenders have undergone “bystander intervention” training. The bar has also hosted police-led classes on the topic. “What our training specifically talked about was intervening in things like sexual assault,” Missoula Police Deparment detective Jamie Merifield told KGVO years ago. “When you see someone in trouble, the training helps you to intervene, and not just turn a blind eye. Most people would want to help, they just don’t know how.” In a similar vein, other establishments around the country have introduced “angel shots,” drinks that people can order as a signal to bartenders that they’re in trouble.

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News

News, Nuggets & Longreads 2 February 2019: Conmen, Archaeobotanists, Maltsters

Here’s everything that grabbed our attention in writing about beer and pubs in the past week, from gig venues to American home-brewing.

Kentucky’s Craft Beer Con Man’ is a hell of a headline and the story, by Michael Moeller for Kentucky Sports Radio, more than lives up to it:

This is the story of a craft beer con man who traveled across the United States and abroad – a man who knew how to exploit the shared weakness of most small businesses – talk a big enough game and a background check won’t be required. Talk an even bigger game and even fool business partners and investors.

(Via @beerbabe.)


Gig posters on a pub in Manchester.

Katie Taylor has been listening to BBC Radio 6 and noticed parallels between concerns about the loss of independent music venues and fretting over the fate of pubs:

Recently, the station has been running a campaign to rediscover and champion local independent music venues, and the more interviews with passionate but skint promoters and owners they broadcast, the stronger I’ve noticed the overlap between their struggles and the struggles of our favourite pubs, taprooms and breweries. There’s an emotional connection there, for sure – the same revolutionary attitude towards resisting developers and buyouts smoulders under a heavy smog of frustration, the same anger and resigned futility wafts through their bravado into their everyday conversations.

Categories
News

News, Nuggets and Longreads 19 January 2019: Bottleshares, Boddies, Brand Loyalty

Here’s everything on beer and pubs we felt the urge to bookmark in the past seven days, from coolships to kask kontroversy.

Joe Stange is now writing for Craft Beer & Brewing and has announced his arrival with an excellent piece on Franconia which succeeds in finding some new angles on this much-written-about beer region:

Here is another thing you can see upstairs, in the attic: a wide, riveted copper coolship… Or rather: You can see it, until the boiling-hot wort hits the pan—littered with a surprising amount of hops pellets for a burst of aroma—and opaque steam rapidly fills the attic. After that, it’s difficult to see anything in there for a while. This coolship is the kind of thing you might expect to see in a lambic brewery, or in an ambitious American wild-beer brewery, or in a museum. Its original purpose, however, has nothing to do with sour beers. It is simply an old-fashioned way to cool wort. Andreas Gänstaller uses it every time he brews lager… “The wort streams out really clear,” he says. “The beer is much more clear because all the bad stuff goes away in the steam.”


Illustration: beer bottles.

If you’ve ever fancied organising a bottle share, or wondered exactly what a bottle share is, then you’ll find this primer by Rach Smith at Look at Brew useful. In in, she explains how the bottle share she runs in Brighton works, and offers tips on setting up your own:

Think about the order in which you’ll be pouring. If there are pale/low abv beers for example, start with them and leave the big, bold Imperial stouts for last so you don’t completely destroy your taste buds early on… [And] don’t judge. It’s not about who can bring the rarest beers, it’s about socialising, learning a little bit along the way and having a damn good time.


Icon: NUGGET.

An interesting point from Ed – could the reason cask beer numbers are down be because we lost a few big brands that made up the bulk of the numbers, such as Boddington’s?


Sierra Nevade Brewing Co neon sign.

With #FlagshipFebruary in mind (see last week’s round-up) Kate Bernot has written about consumer promiscuity for The Takeout:

“I say this whole idea of promiscuity and no brand loyalty is grossly misdefined,” says Lester Jones, chief economist for the National Beer Wholesalers Association. “It was pretty easy 25-30 years ago to find a brand that you liked and trusted and had relations to. I don’t think people have changed, I think it’s just taking longer to sift through the multitude of choices…. Instead of accepting the fact that their job is a lot harder, it’s easy for brewers to turn and say ‘The consumer is fickle. He doesn’t know what he wants.’ No, the consumer knows what he wants and the consumer is tasting to find what he wants, but given so many choices, it just takes longer,” Jones says.


Generic beer pumps in photocopy style.

All this is well and good but what people really want to know is this: where’s the beef at? Well, Jessica Mason wrote this piece arguing that the embrace of cask beer by the likes of Cloudwater signals a resurgence in the health of its image

[Cloudwater’s Paul] Jones [says] that a lot of traditional breweries up and down the country are ‘complete pros and legends’ within cask beer, even if they’re not turning their hands to more modern beer styles. ‘I think something of a hybrid offering from us really ought to diversify what cask beer is and what it could be in the future.’

Wild Card’s head Brewer Jaega Wise, who recently won the title of Brewer of the Year, will be relaunching its cask-beer offering next year. However, she stresses that it will be on the brewery’s terms, reminding how modern brewers are reiterating cask’s relevance, but are not willing to bow to outdated stereotypes.

…which prompted this comeback from Tandleman:

So we need modern craft brewers to show us the way and revive cask? These are the same people that give you cask beer that looks like chicken soup and undermine the work done by brewers for many years to ensure clean, clear, bright beer with distinct flavours.We’d more or less lost the “It’s meant to be like that” nonsense until craft got its hands on cask. Now it is back with a vengeance, as overturning the orthodoxy has given bar staff the right to say it once more, even if the beer looks like a mixture of lumpy fruit juices and smells like Henderson’s Relish.

More point/counterpoint than beef, really, but it’s fascinating how the fault lines (cultural, generational) continue to reveal themselves in new forms.


And finally, there’s this reminder of how many opportunities for disaster are built into the cask ale supply chain:

As ever, for more links, checkout Stan on Mondays (usually including lots of stuff beyond beer, but still about beer) and Alan on Thursday (generally threading links together to make some sort of point).