This is a lazy Sunday morning roundup of links to ‘long reads’, interesting nuggets in the blogoshire and other tasty crumbs of flavour-enhancer-coated pork rind.
Around the blogoshire and internet
- Stan Hieronymus has highlighted a thought-provoking 1999 list of ‘significant brewing figures’ — an attempt to pin down the most influential people in the world of beer, both historical and contemporary. Who’s on your list?
- Leigh ‘Good Stuff’ Linley makes a persuasive case for unusual (salad and dessert) ingredients to give another layer of complexity to low ABV beers.
- There are mixed views on the new cross-industry ‘Let There Be Beer’ advertising campaign: David Preston gives it a reluctant thumbs-down; Pete Brown has his reservations but broadly supports it; and the Pub Curmudgeon is all for a united front. (We think we agree with David.)
Longreads
- Kristen D Burton highlighted this just-published article on seventeenth-century drinking songs and attempts to recreate their sound in context.
- This recent interview with Tom Cadden of the Craft Beer Company by Per Steinar at the Evening Brews blog contains lots of interesting information on the development of the UK ‘craft beer scene’ in the last few years. (Warning: might be considered ‘cheery beery’.)
- Hot Rum Cow is a glossy, quarterly subscription magazine about booze, and this article from January 2013 on Mikkel Borg Bjergsø (of Mikkeler fame) and the emergence of ‘gypsy brewing’ is among their better pieces on beer.
Other stuff
- Bored of the same old ‘fun beer facts’ which actually aren’t fun because you’ve heard them a million times and, anyway, they’re made up? Well, here’s a fresh one: Sydney Greenstreet, star of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, was ‘agency manager for Watney, Combe, Reid & Co. in Harrow in 1901-2‘. Anyone got any others?
- One of London’s new breweries is up for sale — a one-off or the beginning of the ‘shake out’ several people in the industry have told us is due?
9 replies on “Crumbs from the Pork Scratchings Packet”
Quite an interesting article on drinking songs. He’s right about football songs, too. But it’s actually not that hard to hear seventeenth-century drinking songs in their natural habitat: e.g.
Do you know the details of the Theakston’s Carlisle operation, btw? A takeover?
Phil — they took on the State Management brewery when the scheme was wound up.
Never heard of that before – there’s a story in itself. Incredible that it ran right from 1916 to 1973 (at least in Carlisle, Gretna and Cromarty, although a quick google doesn’t bring up much about the last of these).
Who were the 7?
Bass, Whitbread, Allied Lyons, Scottish and Newcastle, Courage… Guinness? …?
Guinness were sometimes included in a ‘Big Seven’, and the missing one is Whitbread.
ITYM Watneys.
I did. Oops.
That brewery sale mentions “possible visa issues”; I assumed that meant for the brewer (one of the US brewers who have set up?) rather than the over-capacity shake-out that may or may not be coming.
I don’t know my breweries well enough to figure out which one it is though – the size of kit should give it away, but I can’t off the top of my head think who has a 6BBL capacity.