Archive for the ‘opinion’ Category
Beer blogging attitude spectrum
Friday, March 23rd, 2012Honesty is Everything
Friday, March 16th, 2012The rights and wrongs of beer blogging and writing, though an example of the worst kind of navel-gazing, is a subject that fascinates us and, as Andy Crouch has kicked this conversation off, we can’t resist joining in.
We’re not qualified to pronounce on ethics, here’s how we feel about a few specific issues.
- There’s nothing wrong with having an agenda, but don’t make us guess what it is. (Retailers, brewers, campaigners and PR people write interesting stuff!)
- There’s nothing wrong with blogs carrying ads as long as they’re obviously ads. Helping spam-merchants and search-engine optimisers by ‘seeding’ content: not cool.
- If you want to give your beer writing away for free, that’s fine with us. If you want to get paid for it, write something that warrants it. As we said on Twitter recently, for us, that means offering some or all of: a unique voice; information we can’t easily find elsewhere; real insight; a new angle; authority.
- There’s nothing wrong with bloggers accepting or even asking for free beer but, if you’re getting freebies, be open about it and let us decide whether we want to put any store in your reviews. If you don’t disclose it, we’ll work it out eventually and despise you.
- Some beer writers get good information from their relationships with brewers and breweries, and that’s great. Namedropping is annoying; and if you start to sound like you work in their PR department, we won’t trust what you have to say about anything else.
- If you are being sponsored by a brewery to attend an event at which the guest speakers are from the sponsoring brewery and you find yourself sat next to the brewery’s PR person drinking free bottles of that brewery’s beer, do try to resist sounding like you’ve been brainwashed: “I had not previously liked Duff beer but after the helicopter ride and cake, I realised what a great brand it is. Hail Duff.”
We get occasional freebies but have yet to ask for any. We don’t carry ads because… we don’t, and why is none of your business. We have met a few brewers now but wouldn’t say any of them were our chums. Evan Rail sent us a free copy of Why Beer Matters (linked above).
UPDATED 09:13 with links to examples of beer writing we’d pay for.
Cheap Beer Challenge
Friday, March 9th, 2012Earlier this week, Keith Flett suggests a solution to the vexing problem of the sometimes worryingly high price of some craft beer: as we read it, he is asking craft brewers to challenge themselves on price and brew at least one ‘people’s pint’.
As has been established, we’re weird: we’re already beer zealots — extremists, if you like — and prioritise buying good beer above many other luxuries in our lives. So, to us, there aren’t many beers which don’t seem affordable; we don’t need convincing that there is a connection between price and quality; and we’re certainly not arguing for craft brewers and bars to cut costs across the board. Generally, we admire their tendency to brew for flavour and worry about price later.
The fact is, though, that for some people, price is an issue through necessity rather than choice. Can anything be done to make sure they aren’t excluded from craft beer? Just one beer? Or do we simply have to accept a ‘them and us’ culture?
Here are some ideas off the top of our heads, in brainstorm mode.
1. The Sainsbury’s Basics model
Sainsbury’s supermarket has a range of economy products in simple packaging, just as all the others do, but their clever gimmick is transparency. They say things like “Basics Cucumber — just as green, watery and likely to give you indigestion, but slightly bent” or “Basics Onions — not uniform sizes, but just as likely to make you cry”. This could also work for beer, e.g. “A simple recipe with only pale malt to let the hops shine through”.
2. Inspired by Macrobrewers
Several breweries in different parts of the country could work together to brew the same beer for their respective markets, saving on distribution costs, but sharing the costs of sales, branding and publicity. As a bonus, the savvy punter gets to enjoy the regional variations.
3. Learning from History
Big brewers have always focused on hitting fixed price points. Look at Ron Pattinson and Kristen England’s 1909 Style Guide and one thing that leaps out is how much sugar, corn, rice, Soylent Green and other adjuncts were used in beers before World War I. Kristen has made and tasted all of those beers and, for the most part, enjoyed them. Once again, if made with care, marketed transparently, and presented as a history lesson, adjunct-laden beers could still be craft beer.
4. Play Ball with the Government
The Government wants brewers to make weaker beers and is giving tax breaks to those who do so. The threshold is 2.8%, which sounds disastrously low, until you consider the success of Brodie’s Citra (which is universally admired) at 3.1%. We like weaker beers because we can drink more of them in a session, and the success of GK IPA suggests that many ‘normal’ punters do, to. (Many brewers are already taking this challenge, of course.)
5. Loss leaders
Sam Smith’s pubs draw people in with the offer of cheap beer but make money from people ‘upgrading’, hence the massive difference between the price of a pint of Old Brewery and a pint of Pure Brewed Lager. Given that most craft beer customers don’t choose on price, would offering one beer at or near cost be such a problem, if it meant drawing in new custom and expanding the market? Which leads us to…
6. A Tax on Beer Zealots
A few ludicrously, deliberately over-priced, over-packaged limited editions beers at the other end of the range could subsidise a ‘people’s pint’ — a kind of tax on craft beer zealots, which many would gladly accept if it meant (a) that they got an interesting beer for their money and (b) it helped to spread the word.
Any more, better ideas?
Note: It goes without saying that our ideas above are poorly thought through, that we’ve missed the point, that they won’t work, etc..
Part-time drinkers
Monday, February 20th, 2012
Here’s a confession: we don’t actually drink all that much. Sorry, brewers, landlords and British drinking culture in general, but we are letting you down.
We don’t go to the pub every night and, when we do, we rarely get beyond tipsy. At home, it’s unusual for us to drink more than a couple of bottles of beer in a session.
Why? Well, partly because we are the kind of uptight oddballs who don’t much like losing control. Mostly because we hate hangovers. And maybe, just maybe, because we are a little concerned for our long term health.
Contrast that with the stories older relatives tell about drinking ten or twenty pints in a weekend session, having worked up to it with five or six on each preceding night; or the world evoked in this post at Pubs of Manchester; and in this extract kindly sent to us by the Pub Curmudgeon:
It was here that I first became aware of the South Welshman’s peculiar dedication to beer, as a pastime. Three male customers ordered three consecutive rounds of pints. When the first man ordered his second (the fourth) round I realised that these three were stuck for rest of the evening…. It is not so much that the South Welsh drink to excess – rather it is a humorously sly but wholehearted approach to the enjoyment of drinking that endears them to me.
Ben Davis, The Traditional English Pub, 1981
All of these describe a relationship with beer (or booze more generally, or perhaps pubs) which is very different to ours. Is it better? It is probably, to steal a word from Davis, more wholehearted, more passionate and, in some ways, more fun. It might also be a bit more dangerous — something of a dance with the devil.
Is this is why we can’t work up a rage over the price of beer? Because we’re part-timers, amateurs, lightweights? Beer would have to get very expensive indeed before we couldn’t afford a couple of pints or bottles — even of quite strong, high-falutin’ craft beer — if we really wanted them.
The picture above is not us! It’s Bailey’s grandparents in the club, mid-session, c.1980.
Beer: a flash in the pan?
Monday, February 13th, 2012On our recent trip to London, we found ourselves pondering the sustainability of the current craze for craft beer.
At the Southampton Arms, as befits our great age, we sat in the corner saying things like “What does he think his hair looks like?”; “Eee, she’ll catch her death in them trousers — they don’t reach her ankles!”; and “Is that lad wearing leggings and cowboy boots?” The crowd was young and fashionable and, for the most part, drinking cask ale from dimple mugs.
We have a suspicion that, in two years time, when beer has had its moment in the spotlight and, say, the eighties wine bar has made a retro comeback, or everyone’s drinking Sahti, or whatever, some of these people will deny ever having touched a pint of ale. Maybe they’ll secretly admit they didn’t like it at all and only did so to look cool.
Even if we are witnessing a mere trend, however, it will be impossible to put beer back in its box. After all, wine didn’t disappear from the collective consciousness when the Dagmar burned down. The heady euphoria of ten new breweries a week and can’t go on forever, but Britain’s beer landscape will have changed for good by the time the fad passes. A hidden demand for good beer will have been flushed out and many will have become (to some extent) beer geeks for life.
It’s hard to have a fling with beer: to know it is to love it.
Marketing: the work of the devil?
Wednesday, February 8th, 2012According to some people, there are two big reasons for crappy industrial beer: bloody accountants and bloody marketing people.
Now, there are some things for which brewery marketing departments might deserve the blame: packaging that damages the product, both literally and in terms of its reputation; empty blandishments — “finest malt and hops”; “premium world lager”; “only four ingredients“; and gimmicky “innovations” forced upon sometimes unwilling brewers.
But can’t marketing, at it’s best, be a bridge between the specialised world of the brewer or beer geek and that of the as-yet unconverted? Like a kind of translator, perhaps.
“Naff marketing terms” might wind-up seasoned beer geeks but they can engage people’s interest in a product they might otherwise never notice or, worse, entirely dismiss. (And they do gain charm with the patina of age…)
Is the best marketing, in fact, a form of beervangelism?
A long term relationship
Sunday, February 5th, 2012Beer writers often say that a beer is “worth buying by the case” (Tim Webb and Joris Pattyn, we’re looking at you) but, being easily-distracted dilettante bloggers whose favourite beer is always the next one, we’ve tended to mix-and-match, trying to cover as much ground as possible.
Fuller’s Past Masters XX Strong, however, was only available by the case, so we bit the bullet and did it.
A whole box of the same beer? What if, once we tried it, we found ourselves lumbered with eleven bottles we don’t want to drink?
As it happened, although we liked it from the off, we only became more impressed as the beer matured. If we’d based our view on bottle number one, we might have stuck with our cautious thumbs-up and the view that Fuller’s 1845 is a better beer.
A whole case of beer takes the pressure off a little. It gives you the chance to just drink without over-thinking; to see a beer from different angles, at different times; to really get to know it. It also helps avoid Open It syndrome — a cupboard full of beers too precious to drink which are slowly going stale — because, hey, there’s a whole case, so why not have another?
This post is based on a lie: we’ve bought cases of beer for parties loads of times, but as we never got to touch any of that beer, and were just left with empty bottles and boxes, they don’t count.
Depends, how much did it cost?
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012Last week, this Tweet got us thinking:
@HardKnottDave @GhostDrinker so sam smith ain’t craft? ‘cos it’s cheap?
— Carpe Zytha (@CarpeZytha) January 25, 2012
Well, in a way, the answer is yes, but bear with us.
How do you reduce the price of beer when you’ve got a price point to reach? You reduce the cost of production, storage and distribution by
- producing in greater volumes
- using fewer and/or cheaper ingredients (e.g. hops)
- conditioning/lagering for shorter times (see Tandleman on this here)
- brewing your beer to be acceptable to the widest possible market.
It’s still possible to brew a good beer within those parameters and, in fact, we’ve had the odd pint of Sam Smith’s Old Brewery Bitter which rivals Harvey’s Sussex Best for complexity and zing. On the whole, however, the more corners are cut, the more industrialised the process, the less likely the beer is to excite anyone. Everyone got that likely, right?
While it would be wrong to answer the question “Is this a craft beer?” with “Depends, how much did it cost?”, it wouldn’t be reckless to bet that a pint that costs £1.30 will be a bit boring. It might still be satisfying, it might not be nasty, but it probably won’t be exciting.
Note: we’re not making the case for super-expensive beer; our beer of the year for 2011 costs £2.60 a pint. And the Sam Smith’s beer pictured above is anything but cheap…
Making the case
Friday, January 27th, 2012Is this nitro-keg stout from a regional family brewer a so-called “craft beer”? What about this notoriously boring cask bitter from another? What about the keg version of this borderline bland but kind-of-OK cask beer?
There is nothing inherently ‘craft’ about one beer or another, and no device you can use to measure a beer’s ‘craftness’. Because it is more subjective than deciding whether a beer is ‘real ale’ or not, it boils down to whether:
(a) there is something like a consensus that a particular beer has craft status (i.e. it ticks all the boxes and leaves little room for argument) or
(b) someone has made the case for it ticking at least some of the boxes.
That might be drinkers (or ‘fans’ as we increasingly frequently call those who boost one brewery or another) or, more often, the brewers themselves. One way the latter can do so is by being transparent about their methods and materials.
Actually, a better question than “Is X craft beer?” is “If Y is craft beer, why isn’t X?”
Ninety nine per cent of the time, though, if you’re asking about a particular beer, you’re being mischievous, and already know the answer.
P.S. Are Eddie and the Hot Rods punk? What about Elvis Costello? What about the reformed Sex Pistols?
The Premium Sausage Problem
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012At some point in the last twenty years, the concept of the ‘premium sausage’ emerged: a banger with fewer additives, better quality meat and stronger flavours.
The problem with premium sausages? They’re sometimes too meaty — they lack a cohesive texture — and just don’t taste like sausages.
Yes, some really cheap sausages are downright nasty, made entirely of salty breadcrumbs dyed pink, but, really, the point of sausages is to make good use of offal and fat. They’re supposed to be full of crappy but delicious meat, fat, flavourings and, yes, breadcrumbs.
How does this relate to beer? After much experimenting, we have to conclude that we can’t taste the difference between whole leaf hops, pellets, extracts and oils, at least not in normal pub-going conditions; refusing to use sugar in beer on purity grounds seems to be missing a trick; and one of our favourite bottled lagers, Svyturys Ekstra Draft, uses rice in its grist, and we’re sure there are others.
Maybe more beers made lovingly but with cheaper ingredients would help to bring the price down? As long as brewers were transparent about it, we wouldn’t mind at all.
