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Blogging and writing

The Month That Was August 2014

The Lugger Inn, Polruan.
The Lugger Inn, Polruan, Cornwall, for no particular reason other than that we drank there in August.

It seems we were among those ‘covering the office’ while the Blogoshire went on summer recess. Here are the highlights of our 22 proper posts from the last month:

→ Our most commented-on post ever, bizarrely, was this piece highlighting something interesting Matt ‘Total’ Curtis had said about Wetherspoon’s American collaboration brews.

→ The pub isn’t everything: drinking at home has played a vital part in the ‘rebirth of British beer’.

→ Our contribution to the weekend’s #beerylongreads jamboree (round-up here) was a 1800 word piece on tensions between old and new at the Spingo brewery, Helston, Cornwall.

And the rest:

→ Here’s how we mentally categorise hop character in beer, and why we’re not sure ‘piney’ is much use for us.

→ Thanks to the famous Quote Investigator, we got a bit closer to finding out if and when John Lennon might have made his famous statement about ‘a quiet pint’.

→ Thinking further on ‘piney’, we proposed some ‘social realist tasting notes’.

→ By way of bonus material, we shared a gallery of images we wanted to use in Brew Britannia but couldn’t.

→ And more DVD extras: to mark London Beer City, we resurrected a deleted scene featuring Patrick Fitzpatrick and Godson’s.

→ Thinking aloud, we tried to work out where the sweet spot between cult-of-personality hero worship and faceless mediocrity lies in regard to brewers…

→ …to which a brewer responded on the QT.

→ Continuing to digest our recently-acquired stack of copies of Grist magazine, we found evidence of a time when British brewing was really getting to grips with the idea of aromatically hoppy beer.

We failed to be outraged by the winner of the Champion Beer of Britain competition.

Fourpure Pils is rough around the edges but grew on us over the course of a six-pack.

→ Etiquette expert R.M. Banks returned for the second instalment of a guide to modern pubmanship on the subject of sharing tables.

→ We visited a pub in the wilds of Penwith which we liked, but which struck as belonging more to CAMRA-land than to Cornwall.

→ Blogging about blogging: when people post without excessive self-censorship, enlightening conversation can ensue, as long as commenters keep their tempers in check.

Klink was a nasty concoction of spoiled beer much loved by the folk of South Staffordshire in the 1860s, or so claimed a correspondent of the Lancet.

Boak wasn’t fooled when Bailey served her Carlsberg Export but told her it was St Austell Korev.

Our local supermarkets continue to let us down on the beer front: ostensibly lots of choice, but actually a rarely-changing range of similar, unexciting beers.

Recording your local boozer in detail is a worthwhile exercise. (We might actually turn this into some kind of project with a hashtag and all that, if people aren’t fed up of us doing that.)

We’ve been intrigued to note issues raised by US reviewers of Brew Britannia: why wasn’t their ‘revolution’ consumer-led? Or was it?

What were perceived to be the major beer styles in 1901? And how did they fit together?

→ Finally, we completed our series of short videos, The Strange Rebirth of British Beer in 10 Objects; and shared quotations from Sean Franklin (tasting notes) and Tom Fort (the essential simplicity of beer).