News, Nuggets & Longreads 01/11/2014

Before we get on to the feast of links, a quick reminder: the next round of #beerylongreads is scheduled for Saturday 29 November, and we’d love you to join in.

→ New Yorker magazine’s latest cover essentially held a mirror up to craft beer drinkers allowing them to see what they wanted to see: some were defensive, others flattered, while yet a third group chuckled with glee from the sidelines. Our favourite take on the whole business was Oliver J. Gray’s, which also elicited a comment from the artist himself, Peter de Sève.

→ The industry-wide Let There Be Beer relaunched. We said this (cautiously for), Pete Brown said this (less cautiously for), and Matt Curtis has promised to expand on this when he’s finished processing his thoughts:

I just watched the unveiling of a £10 million pound car crash that will largely pass people by. The horror.

— Matthew Curtis (@totalcurtis) October 29, 2014

(UPDATE 03/11/2014: Matt’s piece is now up.)

→ Legendary UK beer blogger Jeff ‘Stonch’ Bell (he beat us to it by several months back in 2007) has returned from a several-year hiatus with, among other posts, this refreshingly measured piece on what it is like for publicans to work with pub companies:

The system works like this: we would call SIBA and order the beer, they’d then call the individual brewers and the delivery would be made directly. Then came payment: SIBA would present the bill to Punch for the beer, Punch would pay the rock bottom prices you’d expect from a pubco with huge buying power, and then they’d add their own huge mark-up and present me with the bill.

→ Better known for his historical research, Martyn ‘Zythophile’ Cornell’s latest post is, by his own admission, a fanboyish celebration of his favourite brewery, Berkshire’s Siren. There are lots of interesting details but we were delighted to note yet another brewer explicitly acknowledging the influence of BrewDog, and thus supporting an argument we make in Brew Britannia.

→ Beat Kümin, professor history at Warwick University, looks into the truth behind the popular fear that we are ‘drinking more than ever’ and concludes that [SPOILER]:

Looking back over the centuries, we find no linear increase or decrease of alcohol consumption. Every so often societies tend to slip into moral panics about drinking excess, at times on rather questionable grounds.

(Via @markhailwood.)

→ Robin ‘Thirsty Wench’ LeBlanc celebrated Halloween by reviewing a beer called The Blood of Cthulhu in the style of H.P. Lovecraft.

→ Our top tweeter of 2013, Simon James, continues to make us chuckle:

Well, this Evil Twin Beetroot Berliner Weisse is certainly the best Beetroot Berliner Weisse I've had in a LONG time.

— Simon James (@Gueuzel) October 30, 2014

→ And, inspired by this classic, we Tweeted this:

https://twitter.com/BoakandBailey/status/527770720622088192