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).