Categories
Beer history design

Slopegraphs to Visualise Beer Data?

Like Alan ‘A Good Beer Blog’ McLeod, we’re keen to see more meaningful attempts to visualise the sea of information that surrounds beer — that is, not just whizzy infographics heavy on the graphics but light on info.

In a recent post, Alan directed us towards the work of visualisation guru Edward Tufte, which led us to this excellent blog post on an early innovation of Tufte’s: ‘slopegraphs’.

So, here’s some of Ron Pattinson’s data, drawn painstakingly from the Whitbread archives, presented as a (crude) slopegraph.

Graph showing Whitbread beer production 1904 to 1914.

First thoughts? Well, it doesn’t show us anything Ron wasn’t able to express better in words (IPA up, Mild declining surprisingly early), but it might be useful to some ‘visual learners‘. And, as Charlie Park points out, aren’t slopegraphs really just rearranged line charts? (They certainly are the way me make ’em.)

The chart above was created in Excel and exported to a graphics package for formatting and labelling. It uses a consistent scale, hence the big gap in the middle, which is, in itself, illustrative. UPDATED 02/05/2012: removed bounding box — see comments below.

Categories
Blogging and writing

Yes, But Which Words Do You Like?

Word cloud from our blog

We’re getting kind of irritated at people telling us which beer-related words and phrases they hate, or that they consider ‘meaningless’. Craft beer, real ale, passion, conversion, revolution, craft keg, hoppy, malty… yes, all of those can be annoying, but, honestly, if we only use words that don’t irritate anyone, what are we left with? “Pointing and grunting”, as Martyn ‘Zythophile’ Cornell once put it.

We’d like to see more people suggesting new descriptors, even if they get shot down. Even better, we’d like people just to use language they do like, without apology.

For example, we liked Zak Avery’s phrase ‘volume-produced beers‘ — less judgemental than ‘macro’ or ‘industrial’, its meaning perfectly clear, even though this was the first time we’d come across it.

Max ‘Pivni Filosof’ Bahnson isn’t a fan of the phrase ‘craft beer’ but occasionally uses the quite snappy phrase ‘alternative beers’ instead. We like it — it conveys something to us, but we’d be hard pressed to write a dictionary definition.

We were also tickled by Mike McGuigan’s descriptor for on-brand, repetitive messaging from The Scottish Brewery, which is hereafter to be known as Brewdogma.

To have a meaningful conversation, we need more words to play with, not fewer.

Categories
Uncategorized

Perspective Check

It can be odd but good for us to spend time with people who aren’t obsessive about beer.

Our guest this weekend speaks her mind and knows a lot about books, music, history, theology, food and, yes, wine… but nothing whatsoever about beer.

She was keen to taste every beer we drank, finding most of them ‘interesting’ or ‘nice’. Anything dark she thought was like Guinness. And that was the extent of her ‘engagement’ with the stuff in the glass.

How could she not be blown away by Westmalle Triple? Or Fuller’s Vintage Ale? Nice but boozy. Nice!? With her enquiring mind, how could she not at least be intrigued by the flavours, the hints of this and aromas of that? Well, she wasn’t, and our bafflement is our problem, not hers.

We ought to understand it. We’re exactly the same about wine — we’ll drink it, but with a shrug, and without passing comment or judgement. It just does nothing for us. We’re as interested in wine as in, say, envelopes.

Some people are beer geeks; others are beer drinkers; but, for a large number of people, beer might as well not exist. It’s important for us to occasionally emerge from our cave, blinking and smelling of hops, to be reminded of that.

We went for a run from Penzance to Mousehole in a gale yesterday. No bottle of Fuller’s Vintage has never tasted better, nor any fire felt warmer, than those we enjoyed on our return.

Categories
breweries Generalisations about beer culture

Natural Tensions

Of course British brewing is not “one big happy family”.

We recently heard about an incident where the owner of a well-established small brewery got drunk and physically assaulted the  head of a new ‘craft brewery’ he thought was muscling in on his territory.

We read this post in which a British real ale brewer kicks back against what he calls “the pretentious-isation” of beer — something which, although they wouldn’t necessarily call it that, is a key part of the business model for many new breweries.

On Twitter, we read cryptic comments from brewers slyly criticising the work of unnamed competitors. (Yes, competitors, despite the friendships and connections.)

And need barely mention The Scottish Brewery (many bloggers consider it bad luck to write their name before a performance…) and their frequent attacks on, or dismissals of, their peers.

That’s not to say there isn’t collaboration and community. We’ve heard first hand from small brewers about the help and advice they’ve had from other, better established breweries; and can you imagine the head baker at Warburton’s collaborating on a special bread with a small bakery in Cumbria?*

These tensions might become more apparent as the market reaches saturation point and, though they make sensitive punters like us squirm, they’re entirely natural and understandable. After all, many of the people involved have a lot at stake.

*This material previously released in an edited form on Twitter...

Categories
pubs

Off to the Bog

Trafalgar toilet

No toilets deserve to be described as ‘the bog’ more than those you find in British pubs.

Portrait of a pub toilet

At its worst: chipped tiles, damp chipboard partitions and wet floors; blinking fluorescent light; a toilet seat leaning against the wall, a cubicle door without a bolt, no toilet roll. Hasn’t that bit of chewing gum been in the urinal, next to the disintegrating cigarette end, for the last two weeks? The floor is wet. A piece of paper on the wall says, mockingly: “These toilets are inspected regularly.” Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

The ladies have it good

Bailey emerges from ‘the gents’ with a horrified look on his face, hands dripping wet: “Ugh. That was horrible. No soap, hand-drier busted. Need to throw these shoes away. How were the ladies?” Boak looks puzzled. “Lovely, actually. Really beautifully decorated, and clean… wow! I could see my face reflected in the tiles. And feel how soft my hands are — free balm!”

Nice pubs can have horrible bogs, and vice versa

We’ve been in posh pubs whose toilets are nonetheless iredeemably bad, as if they’d spent every penny on ‘limited edition art prints’ and had to cut back on soap and cleaning products as a result. They know that a code of silence exists: no-one wants to talk about the toilets over their rustic duck pate.

Seriously, no soap? What the…?

We don’t expect all pubs to have the palacial facilities of a Wetherspoons, or bar staff to spend their whole shift mopping up wee. We can deal with no locks on the cubicles (lean against the door, loud whistling… there are ways) and all the other indignities. But we must have soap. A bar of coal tar would do.

All we want, truly, is to be able to share a bag of crisps with our friends with a clear conscience.

Picture from Flickr Creative Commons. This post is our contribution to Pub Bog Day 2012.