Categories
opinion

Do fruit juice sours get people into beer?

There are now beers that look and taste just like fruit juice or pop. Is there a route from enjoying those to appreciating, say, cask bitter?

First, we should say this: we (and especially Jess) quite like fruit juice beers. We have a ready supply from our local specialist off licence, Pat’s News and Booze.

They’re usually available at some of our favourite bristol pubs, too, such as The King’s Head, The Llandoger Trow and The Swan With Two Necks.

Often filed under ‘sours’, and badged as ‘modern sour beer’ or something similar, sourness is, oddly, not always a defining feature.

Or, at least, to us they seem no more sour than a can of Lilt or Fanta, and distinctly less so than a glass of grapefruit juice.

Our notes on Vault City’s Fruit Salad ‘session sour’, for example, were “artificial fruit (as hinted at by garish label) but not too sweet or sour… vanilla notes… raspberry dominates over pineapple”.

We can imagine why these are popular.

For a start, the cans often look appealing with bright colours, attractive pop art typography, and words like ‘sherbet’ or ‘tropical’ that get your mouth watering. (Don’t tell the Portman Group.)

Secondly, they don’t look, smell or taste like beer, just as berry cider doesn’t look, smell or taste like cider, and the original Hooch didn’t look, smell or taste like booze at all.

This is a major selling point if you don’t like beer, or the culture that comes with it.

Drinking a kiwi, melon and mango session sour this weekend, we marvelled at its similarity to actual mango juice, even down to the viscous texture, achieved with oats.

We then tried to imagine someone starting out on beers like this, perhaps as a student, and wondered if they’d ever find their way to Bass or Young’s Ordinary.

Perhaps the novelty of novelty beers might wear off after a while. We often find ourselves saying things like: “This is good but I couldn’t drink two in a row.”

Or maybe once you’re a fan of a particular brewery you find yourself willing to try their soft and hazy IPA. The one that’s a bit like fruit juice, but couldn’t actually pass for a smoothie. That is definitely beer, with discernible hops, even if we wish it was more bitter.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter at all.

If fruit juice beers allow breweries to connect with customers who would otherwise drink Reef or Bacardi Breezers, that’s good for the industry.

In terms of cash flow, anyway.

Categories
opinion

Be as into beer as you need to be

How interested should you be in beer? As interested as you want to be, as long as it makes life more enjoyable.

That could mean not at all.

If being fussy or analytical about beer makes you enjoy life less, then don’t do it.

Drink what you like, where you like.

You’re not doing it ‘wrong’ or missing out.

Equally, you might find, as we have, that being slightly obsessive makes the world more fun.

It’s an optional downloadable add-on that gives us a new way to look at and explore places.

A good pub or brewery tap can turn a dead end into a destination.

With beer in mind, a few spare hours between appointments can become a mission, and a pleasure.

Decisions make themselves. Options grey themselves out.

Which way to go?

That way, towards the beer.

Talking about beer beats talking about the weather, or football, or wallowing in the grim state of politics.

Or, at least, it’s a way of cutting the grim state of politics into digestible pieces.

We can’t change the world but we might be able to nudge things along in our own small corner of it.

If you’re not interested in beer, or have fallen out of love with it, don’t fret.

There’ll be something else along soon enough – birdwatching or woodwork or embroidery or…

If you’re lucky, that is. These harmless obsessions are a blessing, for most of us.

Categories
opinion

The big question of 1922: will England go dry?

In his 1922 book My Discovery of England the Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock turned his attention to British drinking habits, among other topics.

Leacock was famous around the world for his satirical social sketches. He was also politically conservative, pro-Empire and downright racist.

A hundred years on, that makes deciphering his writing difficult.

What does he mean, and what is he saying for comic effect?

Without context, without being absorbed in the issues of the day, it’s hard to say.

His commentary on women being admitted to universities, for example, sounds so extreme that it can’t be sincere. But it seems it was.

On the politics and culture of booze and pubs, however, we feel on safer ground.

In a chapter called ‘Is prohibition coming to England?’ he begins by suggesting, in exaggerated terms, that all anybody in the US and Canada was talking about at the time was prohibition:

A ‘scholarly’ man no longer means a man who can talk well on literary subjects, but a man who understands the eighteenth amendment and can explain the legal difference between implemental statutes such as the Volstead Act and the underlying State legislation. A ‘scientist’ is a man who can make clear the distinction between alcoholic percentages by bulk and by weight.

With that in mind, he says, he knew he would be expected to answer the question “Is England going dry?” and so set out to answer it.

What he discovered was, in short, that we are a nation of drunkards:

My first impression on the subject was, I must say, one of severe moral shock. Landing in England after having spent the summer in Ontario, it seemed a terrible thing to see people openly drinking on an English train. On an Ontario train, as everybody knows, there is no way of taking a drink except by climbing up on the roof, lying flat on one’s stomach, and taking a suck out of a flask. But in England in any dining car one actually sees a waiter approach a person dining and say, “Beer, sir, or wine?” This is done in broad daylight, with no apparent sense of criminality or moral shame. Appalling though it sounds, bottled ale is openly sold on the trains at 25 cents a bottle, and dry sherry at 18 cents a glass.

He is, here, clearly parodying the tone of temperance campaigners, many of whose books and articles we’ve endured over the years. He goes on:

I realized I was in England and that in the British Isles they still tolerate the consumption of alcohol. Indeed, I doubt if they are even aware they are “consuming alcohol”. Their impression is that they are drinking beer.

If you were in any doubt about his seriousness, his statistics would finally tip you off: “The percentage of the working class drinking beer is 125; the percentage of the class without working drinking beer is 200.”

His judgement on the likelihood of prohibition coming into effect in Britain was sincere, though.

“In Scotland,” he writes, “prohibition is not coming; if anything, it is going.” There, he observes, people don’t drink for pleasure anyway. They take whisky “as a medicine, or as a precaution, or as a wise offset against a rather treacherous climate; but as a beverage, never.”

But in England, “prohibition could easily come” and “signs that indicate the possible approach of prohibition”.

He notices, for example, the weird opening hours of pubs:

In London especially one feels the full force of the ‘closing’ regulations. The bars open and shut at intervals like daisies blinking at the sun. And, like the flowers at evening, they close their petals with the darkness. In London they have already adopted the deadly phrases of the prohibitionist, such as “alcohol” and “liquor traffic,” and so on; and already the “sale of spirits” stops absolutely at about eleven o’clock at night.

For all his snark, those opening lines are actually rather beautiful. We always like it when people write poetically about pubs.

His argument (apparently sincere… again, it’s hard to keep track) is that by conceding the need to regulate alcohol consumption at all, England is drifting into prohibition, and giving the puritans somewhere to insert their lever.

He concludes the chapter with a letter written in the voice of an imagined American prohibitionist after prohibition has been imposed in England.

It’s broad, but funny.

He has workers refusing to knock-off at the end of a shift because, without a pub to go to, they’re happy to keep laying bricks.

Members of the House of Lords turn to opium and chewing tobacco.

And the general public, hearing that a popular brand of soap contains alcohol, starts “eating cakes of it”.

The concluding line of this letter is the most pointed, and will sound familiar to anyone who has read any of the more libertarian beer bloggers in recent years:

But I don’t want you to think that if you come over here to see me your private life will be in any way impaired or curtailed. I am glad to say that I have plenty of rich connections whose cellars are very amply stocked. The Duke of Blank is said to have five thousand cases of Scotch whisky, and I have managed to get a card of introduction to his butler. In fact, you will find that, just as with us in America, the benefit of prohibition is intended to fall on the poorer classes; there is no desire to interfere with the rich.

We picked up a very tatty 1923 copy of this book for £2. There are quite a few copies on eBay for around the same price. Or you can read it for free at archive.org and elsewhere.

Categories
News opinion

News, nuggets and longreads 18 February 2023: The Pylons

We’ve rounded up the most compelling articles and blog posts about beer and pubs from the past week, including trends, taprooms and signs of the times.

For the Financial Times Oliver Barnes reports on the energy crisis and pub closures:

“Energy costs are simply a pub killer,” said Steven Alton, chief executive of the British Institute of Innkeeping, which represents independent pubs. He estimated that up to half of venues were suffering because they were locked into fixed-term energy contracts as prices peaked last autumn in “a grossly unfair and uncompetitive [energy] market”.

(We can see this one fine but you might get caught by the paywall.)


Keg taps.

At British Beer Breaks Phil Mellows observes a new phenomenon: brewery taprooms that live on even after the breweries that built them have folded. He lists several examples and says:

Businesses do fail, of course. That’s capitalism. But they include some high-profile shockers. Earlier this week, Southampton’s Unity Brewing gave up, announcing on Twitter that the accumulation of lockdowns, rising costs and falling sales made it “impossible to continue”… But hang on. It says here “The Unity Bottleshop & Tasting Room… will continue to trade… under a new brand.”


A stained glass window with a map of India and a train full of people, some with turbans.
A stained glass window at The Red Lion. SOURCE: David Jesudason.

In the run up to the launch of his guide to Desi pubs, due in May, David Jesudason continues to post interesting stuff via his Substack newsletter. This week, it’s a portrait of The Red Lion, West Bromwich:

The Red Lion’s big surprise is the custodian, Satnam Purewal, the son of original publican Jeet, who is a forward-thinking trailblazer and has shaped the pub to fit his personality. Being a sociology and psychology teacher he’s, as you’d imagine, an articulate advocate of the power of desi pubs. (“Pubs create social cohesion,” he told me. “And that’s the best thing about pubs.”)… But he also has created a modern, family and female-friendly pub. The novel features include a retractable roof, a quiet room suitable for children with autism and table service, which was brought in during the Pandemic but has ensured women avoid “the male gaze” of bar flies.


The shuttered front of Juno.
SOURCE: Lisa Grimm.

We’re continuing to enjoy Lisa Grimm’s notes on the pubs of Dublin, a city we really would like to visit at some point. This week she wrote about Juno, of which her “expectations were not high”:

When the new signage appeared, I assumed ‘Juno‘ was a nod to Seán O’Casey, born just down the road. As there is now a cocktail called The Paycock on the menu, that would seem to track. I’m not sure there’s a hard-and-fast rule that every pub in Dublin needs to be mentioned in Ulysses and/or has a Brendan Behan anecdote, I am all for bringing in other local writers… In the summer of 2022, the doors began to occasionally open on weekends; as I walk by several times a day as a matter of course, it was important to stop in to investigate, For Science. At the time, only the main bar was open, and the single craft-y tap was a Brewdog one, but the Guinness was in good shape, and the décor was a good start – freshly-painted all around, with framed pictures and art that celebrated Dublin… without veering into theme pub territory…


A 1960s pub.
An Oldham pub.

We enjoyed this brief tour of the pubs of Oldham by Duncan ‘Pubmeister’ Mackay, with an emphasis on what’s changed:

The excellent closed pubs project lists 140 premises in Oldham, some with unusual names: the Filho Inn; Gold Diggers Arms; Help the Poor Struggler; and Turn of Luck. 3 different premises were called the Spinners, well it was a mill town. I love this picture. It’s most famous publican was Albert Pierrepoint, better known as a hangman, so probably not someone to argue with over last orders. One of several hundred he executed was a customer, James Corbitt, with whom he had sung duets in the pub. Pierrepoint caused a stir in his later autobiography when he said he was opposed to the death penalty, writing “if death were a deterrent I might be expected to know”.


A windmill in Amsterdam.
Brouwerij ‘t IJ, Amsterdam, in 2018.

Ron Pattinson has broken away from his usual beat to leave a useful record for future beer historians, observing changes in the Dutch beer scene in recent years:

IPA started turning up a few years back. But relatively mainstream ones, in the form of Brand or ‘t Ij. More recently, crafty stuff has been appearing. OK, Oedipus, now owned by Heineken, isn’t true craft any more. Some of the others are more worthy of the description. (If you think that it still means something.)… Great you might say. Not so much for me. Because they no longer sell any Trappist beers. As elsewhere in Holland, the range of Belgian beers available is being trimmed back. There’s still Leffe Gulden Draak, Kasteel, La Chouffe, Duvel and Tripel Karmeliet on offer. Even Duvel Tripel Hop. But that’s about it for Belgium.


Photographer Marge Bradshaw has an interesting project underway “exploring the experiences of women working in the micro pub and brewery trade”. The first is a portrait of Rachel who says: “I feel like I have to work twice as hard because I’m a woman and I have to battle with some people’s perceptions of me and the business… So when I did my cellar training I put my certificates on the wall, and I really shouldn’t have to do that.”


Finally, from Twitter…

…and from Mastodon:

A post from Adrian Tierney-Jones: “Good visit to Manchester and Liverpool pubs this week researching my next book - haven’t drunk so much cask beer for ages - here are some pix.” With pictures of cask ale and traditional pubs.

For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.

Categories
opinion pubs

How do you feel about pubs closing for private parties?

“See, this pisses me off. I haven’t been to this pub in two years, I go out of my way, and it’s shut for a private bloody function.”

“I can’t begrudge them, not in February during a hospitality crisis. Guaranteed business when they might otherwise be totally dead.”

“But what message does it send? Don’t bother coming here, it’s never open.”

“Maybe it’s about the message it sends to the regulars and locals – that this is a space they can use when they need it.”

“Harrumph. I suppose my view is that only pubs with more than one room should host parties. One-room backstreet pubs aren’t designed for it.”

“So you let the big chain pubs have all the party business? And force people to have their parties in pubs they don’t like, or don’t have any connection with?”

“I think there’s something in the idea that pubs should keep regular hours, be open as often as possible, and resist the idea of reservations. They’re training people out of the idea of a quick pint. They’re making spontaneity impossible.”

“When you’re managing a business you don’t want spontaneous customers. You want to be able to plan staffing and project earnings.”

“But pubs aren’t just businesses…”