The Month That Was July 2014

We came up with 16 proper blog posts in a busy July. First, the highlights:

→ At the very beginning of the month, we looked into the history of a single remarkable pub — the Samuel Whitbread on Leicester Square, London, which went from flagship to dump in a little over a decade.

→ Taking part in the judging at a home brewing competition gave us just the slightest inkling of the difficulties inherent in the process.

→ And two related posts generated plenty of discussion. The first was a plea for greater tolerance of other people’s preferences; and the second set out what we can actually be bothered to drink these days. (Alan McLeod responded, as did his occasional writing partner Max Bahnson.)

And the rest:

→ It’s the time of year when we usually list our favourite Cornish beers and pubs, but, this time, we decided just to focus on Falmouth’s emerging beer ‘scene’.

→ We tasted some black beers, and also Siren White IPA.

→ For last month’s Session we turned up a note of Napoleon’s desire to grow hops in Egypt to keep his armies supplied with beer as they marched.

→ We pondered on comments from a distributor about the price of craft beer: “Everyone, including me, is begging them for a few bottles here, a keg there, so they’ve got absolutely no incentive to offer discounts.”

→ There were many books we relied up on when writing Brew Britannia — this reading list highlights some of the most important.

→ Observing friends, we noted that, for some people, ‘localness’ is enough to sell a beer.

→ Drifting off our own turf, we wondered if the Utopian tendency in mid-20th century architecture was part of the same urge that drove Watney’s et al — “Knock down those old hovels!”

→ Turning our attention to lager, for a project which we’re tentatively calling The Gambrinus Waltz, we considered some modern-incarnations of Vienna beer.

→ Then, a few days later, we compared the spread of German beer in the 19th century with the spread of American craft beer (namely Stone’s move into Germany) in the last decade.

→ After a couple of years of yearning, we finally got to try Batham’s Best Bitter as a side benefit of our trip to Birmingham.

→ Brian Jackson’s 1968 book Working Class Community has some great commentary on northern working social clubs, we discovered.

→ Having used it as a symbol of the growth of ‘craft beer’ in the UK, we popped back to Bristol to check on progress at Small Bar.

→ There were also several round-ups of things to read (July 5 | 12 | 19 | 26), a couple of nice quotations, a gallery, and two videos. (The last in that video series is due this week — honest!)