Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

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

First, the news that Ash Corbett-Collins has been named as the new chair of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). We’ve chatted with Ash on social media on and off over the years and he’s always struck as pretty passionate. He’s been interviewed by Ian Webster at The Beertonian where we learn a few interesting things. First, he’s from Burton. Secondly, his arm is covered with a tattoo of hops. And, thirdly, that he has pragmatic view of the idea that CAMRA needs to recruit young members:

“Many people ask me how we get more young people involved in CAMRA but I think that’s a difficult ask when so many of them simply don’t have the spare time, energy or money when they are starting their careers and families themselves. We need to be encouraging our members who are at the next stage in their life, maybe their kids are becoming independent, their careers are settled or they are recently retired. These members are more likely to have the time and energy to get involved in the Campaign.”

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At Beervana Jeff Alworth has written an in-depth piece about Bass – its history, its decline, and its somewhat surprising survival as a cult beer:

I keep thinking Bass will die, and it keeps not dying. It is a tiny brand now—ABI doesn’t even mention it on their website—and yet a surprisingly beloved one. Writing for Pellicle, Phil Mellows details its strange afterlife as a cult classic. Old beers never really die so long as those who love them remain, but it seems like Bass’s modern existence is more than just the vapor of nostalgia. Mellows mentioned a Facebook page devoted to Bass, and it remains quite lively with fans discussing where to find pints of their beloved bitter… People have been eulogizing cask ale for over fifty years in Britain, but it never really dies. It’s too good and there are too many people who still love it.

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It’s always exciting when Martyn Cornell writes one of his ‘Everything you think you know about X is wrong’ posts. This time, it’s the ‘Hymn to Ninkasi’ so often exploited in the marketing of beer and quoted by beer writers:

It’s a claim you will find repeated in dozens – possibly hundreds – of places: that the so-called “Hymn to Ninkasi”, a poem in the Sumerian language to the goddess of beer, at least 3,900 years old, known from three fragmentary clay tablets found in and around the ancient city of Nippur, which stood between the Euphrates and the Tigris, is “effectively a Sumerian recipe for brewing beer”, “the oldest beer recipe in history”, with a description of “the detailed brewing process” that “modern researchers have used to recreate Sumerian beer.” The Hymn to Ninkasi, according to one American publication, “served not only as spiritual homage but also as detailed brewing instructions for the beverage that came to be known as beer.”… Unfortunately, that is all total steaming nonsense… In fact the “Hymn to Ninkasi” (a name evidently first given to the poem, as “Die Ninkasi-Hymnus”, by Heinrich Zimmern, professor of Egyptology at the University of Leipzig, in 1913) is no more a guide to Sumerian beer making than Robbie Burns’s poem “John Barleycorn” is a guide to 18th century Scottish malting techniques – much less so, in fact, because we are not yet three centuries away from Burns, and his language is easily understood.

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The Beer Nut has been in Bulgaria and his report from the capital, Sofia, offer a glimpse of a craft beer scene struggling to be born:

Pale lager from multinational brewing interests rules supreme, of course. And while there’s an independent end of the industry as well, doubtless run by the same breed of idealistic enthusiasts that makes microbrewing happen everywhere, it looked to be under-regarded and showing little signs of individuality… The tone for that was set on day one in the capital, Sofia. Bar one was High Five, where I counted the seating as ten stools and a toilet. On two visits on different days, those were occupied by precisely zero other drinkers. Beer one was July Morning, a Helles from Sofia Electric, whose beers occasionally show up in Dublin. This one, a bit underdone at 4.4% ABV, had a tang of vinegar about both the aroma and the flavour, though less pronounced in the latter. Looking around, I guessed that turnover and freshness were the issue here.

The story continues in Plovdiv (“I wouldn’t class it as an A-1 beer destination… although it has definitely made an effort”) and Nessebar – “opportunities to drink interesting beer are very thin on the ground”.

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At Daft Eejit brewing Andreas Krennmair takes us back in time to the Oktoberfest of 1843. How was it laid out? And which breweries’ beers might we have enjoyed? The names are distinctly evocative:

Singelspieler… Mader… Oberkandler… Knor[r]… Hacker… Löwenbräu… Pschor[r]… Unterkandler… Tölzer… Hesselloher… Some of these breweries resp. brands are still around, like Hacker and Pschorr in the Hacker-Pschorr brand, and Löwenbräu, while others are less known: Maderbräu is probably best known these day through Maderbräustraße, the little street next to Weißes Brauhaus in Munich: when Georg Schneider had to move out of the old Weißes Brauhaus (roughly where Hofbräuhaus is located nowadays), he managed to buy the defunct Maderbräu brewery building and relocate his brewery there. Only the street name and a sign on the wall of Weißes Brauhaus are reminders of this old Munich brewery.

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Is Oktoberfest, as celebrated in British pubs and taprooms, a bit of fun, or utterly cringe? For Pellicle cartoonist David Bailey explores that question in a few frames packed with questions, opinions and ideas.

(These cartoon posts could do with alt text, though. We think someone using a screen reader, because they’re blind, for example, would just hear: “Individual one dot png, individual 2 dot png, individual 3 dot png…)

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Finally, from Instagram, an ordinarily handsome pub…

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A post shared by Steven Paul Collins (@theprolonging)

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

Here’s all the writing about beer that grabbed our attention in the past week, from Old Puke to Moons Under Water.

First, in the news, an academic study has found that people drink less when they’re offered only the choice of ⅔-of-a-pint glasses, and not full pints. Yes, we know this sounds obvious, but the really interesting bit is this: “Researchers found drinkers tend to stick to a specific number of servings when drinking at a pub, regardless of size.” As in, people will have, say, 4 drinks, which might be 4 litres if all you have is Maßkrugs, or 8 thirds-of-a-pint if you only have ⅔-of-a-pint glasses. Or something like that.

We wrote about the rise of ⅔ glasses a decade ago in Brew Britannia. Since then, they’ve remained a novelty, only found in the venues that want to discourage the boshing of pints, or slyly conceal relatively high prices, or both.

Personally, as we find ourselves getting older and less able to process booze, we can imagine being glad of the option to have, as Ed Vaizey puts it, “what looks like a pint, feels like a pint but isn’t a pint”. But we’d like to keep the pint, too, of course. More choice, not less.

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Our favourite format of article at Pellicle is the deep dive into the story and significance of specific beer. This week Katie Mather (who is writing tons of good stuff right now, by the way) shared thoughts on Theakston Old Peculier – a beer we wish we encountered more often:

At the Craven Arms in Appletreewick, Theakstons’ Old Peculier is served from the wood. They sell so many other good things too, but this is what I came for, and to tell the truth, it’s what you came for too. In this perfect ivy-and-stone farmhouse of a pub nothing else makes sense. I order two and am congratulated on my choice by not one, not two, but three separate drinkers at the bar… The peat-dark waters of the North Yorkshire Moors are described by my pint. In its sparkling clear, deep ruby depths, I can see glints of bronze – I’ve moved the glass so it perfectly catches the light from a small window on the other side of the room. It’s funny, even the head has a touch of that earthy colour about it, like the foam under a waterfall, or in the deadly swirling of the Bolton Strid.It’s funny, even the head has a touch of that earthy colour about it, like the foam under a waterfall, or in the deadly swirling of the Bolton Strid.

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David Jesudason continues to unearth stories that reveal the history of racism in Britain through the lens of pubs and beer. This week, it’s the complex story of a racist pub sign, inspired by a probably-not-racist street name, and displayed outside a pub with black customers:

Baroness Martha Osamor came to this country in 1963 from Nigeria when she was aged 24… After a few years Martha… became part of Tottenham’s community and by the late 1970s there was a focus on monthly meetings to fight issues that the black community faced, such as racist sus laws and school exclusions, under the guise of the United Black Women’s Action Group (UBWAG)… Often black residents would bring examples of racism to the group, such as images in school books, and it was in this context that a complaint was presented about the pub sign at the nearby Black Boy pub on West Green Road… A white Tottenham resident told me that the sign was present from at least the 1960s [and] was very offensive by the 1970s.

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Is the availability of Zinnebir by Brasserie de la Senne an indicator that a Brussels neighbourhood has gentrified? Eoghan Walsh thinks it might be:

It’s hard to get a grasp on how much inroads gentrification has really made at Simonis and elsewhere in the commune – like most of Brussels lately, things feel a little run-down. But maybe the appearance of Zinnebir on bar menus is a good cipher. Researchers have, after all, used the prevalence of coffee shops and chicken shops to map gentrification in London to map demographic changes. Why couldn’t we develop some kind of Zinnebir Index to chart the penetration of Brussels’ number one beer across the city and what correlation it has with the spread of gentrification. Maybe this appearance of Zinnebir at the end of my street is a shooting star, a Halley’s Comet.

What would be the equivalent where you live? Beavertown beers and Camden Hells, while no longer beloved by craft beer geeks, might be in our minds.

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Adrian Tierney-Jones has written another entry for that imaginary anthology of ours, The Moons Under Water, setting out his idea of the perfect pub:

I am a great believer in the use of wood in a pub, welcoming wooden walls and floors that make you feel safe, that speak the secret language of the forest, the tranquillity and silence of ancient woodland. So why is wood important? For me it is about comfort, and about how I like a certain sense of antiquity even if the joiners only sorted it out last week. Perhaps it’s the case that wood gets worn and weathered and I like what looks like the patina of age. I think of a pub I visit frequently in Exeter with the worn wooden floors and a wooden bar that looks as if it was put in when Noah came out of the ark.

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Now, some nuggets of brewing history. At Daft Eejit Brewing Andreas Krennmair has shared stats from c.1890 which reveal the extent to which bottom-fermenting beer was overtaking top-fermenting beer in Germany during the 19th century:

What’s very noticeable is that there are only three states with more bottom- than top-fermenting breweries: Hesse, Thuringia and Bremen… But once we look at the average production volumes per brewery of top- vs bottom-fermenting breweries, we’re getting a different picture… Very clearly, bottom-fermenting breweries were producing significantly more beer on average than top-fermenting breweries, across the board.

And at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins Ron Pattinson is mining a seam: what can old beer guides tell us about the beer of the 1970s? Here’s a representative post but you’ll also want to dig back through the past week or two:

I’ve been thinking about why the 1980s saw so many regional brewers disappear. Could it be connected with the rise of Lager? Regionals struggled to establish Lager brands of their own and hence were at a disadvantage compared to national brewers. In 1970, the big brewers held 92% of the Lager market. And in 1975, Lager had grabbed 20% of the beer market. As a regional, that’s one in five pints that you can’t supply… Small brewers – if their beer was any good – would have drinkers seek out their pubs. You’d make the effort to go to a Harveys or Bathams pub. But who would bother to find a Vaux or Matthew Brown tied house?

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Finally, from BlueSky….

Tell me you took the car to Belgium without telling me you took the car to Belgium… #BeerSky

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— Gaby (@drgabywolferink.bsky.social) September 20, 2024 at 7:04 PM

For more good reading check out Alan McLeod’s round-up rom Thursday.