News, Nuggets and Longreads 18/01/2014

Before we sit down to watch Going Live! it’s time to round-up links to beer-related writings that have caught our interest this week.

→ Continuing the discussion on sexism in the world of beer, Yvan Seth (a ‘progressive’ active CAMRA member) suggested some ways in which the Campaign might be more active in making women feel welcome. As always, there’s a risk of imposing too many rules, but his ideas seem very practical to us. Are there really any blokes who would come away from a beer festival saying, ‘Well, it was OK, but I’d have enjoyed it more if there’d been a few more pump-clips with tits on’?

→ This week’s inspiring home brew recipe is from Ron Pattinson and Kristen England’s series of ‘Let’s Brew Wednesday’ posts: Tetley’s Mild, 1945. It’s interesting to see flaked barley among the ingredients — a hangover from wartime restrictions, Ron reckons. We’re definitely going to make this at some point.

→ Saved to Pocket this week: Rebecca Lemon’s lengthy essay on drunkenness in Shakespeare, and boozing in Elizabethan theatres, from the Lapham Quarterly:

But more than snacking, this audience joins Falstaff in drinking heavily, ordering up their ale and wine straight through the performance and the intermission… As Thomas Platter, a Swiss visitor to London, noted in his diary in 1599, “During the performance food and drink are carried round the audience, so that for what one cares to pay one may also have refreshment.” The distractions were many, not only from drunk patrons themselves: ale produced a hissing noise when tapped, and those opening it were shouted down by audience members annoyed by the sound.

→ For the second time in a year, Hollywood actor Shia LaBoeouf has been involved in a fracas at the Hobgoblin pub in New Cross, South London. What next — Channing Tatum in a dust-up at a former Firkin in Lewisham? (This story brought to our attention by Bailey’s former flatmate, with whom he used to drink at the Hobgoblin c.2001, while living nearby.)

→ Nick Wheat of Dronfield CAMRA kindly emailed to tip us off to the imminent release on DVD of an obscure proto-Ealing Comedy, Cheer Boys Cheer:

Two young lovers are caught on either side of a dispute over the territorial ambitions of the monolithic Ironside brewery against an ‘olde-worlde’, traditional family-run concern, Greenleaf.