News, Nuggets & Longreads 28/03/2015

It’s Saturday so here’s all the good beer-related reading from the blogoshire and beyond from the last week.

→ For Craft Beer & Brewing, Joe Stange gave five tips for brewing convincing Belgian beer:

Okay, so there are some credible American-made, Belgian-inspired beers out there—even a few great ones. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of silly ones: sweet, spiced, boozy, under-attenuated, under-hopped, under-carbonated… Ready for some criticism and remarks?

→ The Brewery History Society has made available for free download (unfortunately only as a PDF) a 70 page history of the Anchor Brewery, Southwark — an early work by Professor Peter Mathias who would go on to write the heavyweight book The Brewing Industry in England, 1700-1830.

→ For It’s Nice That, advertising guru King Adz (Adam N. Stone) considered why ‘authenticity’ has become the Holy Grail in marketing and what it really means. (Slightly tangential but by no means irrelevant in consideration of ‘craft beer’ and how it is sold.)

→ Reuben Gray took made a necessarily vague stab at an exposé of the commercial jiggery-pokery used by bigger breweries to squeeze craft beer out of bars in Ireland:

I’m hearing reports from brewers and some publicans that some of the big drinks companies in Ireland are solely targeting craft beer, all craft beer. They are offering 5 figure sums to pubs serving lots of craft beer to take it all out and replace it with their products and to even agree to keep out the craft for a year. They aren’t requesting the same of their larger rivals products for obvious reasons.

→ Writing for The Verge, Elizabeth Loppato deliberately got steaming drunk so that she could test out a Las Vegas clinic run by a former anaesthesiologist that claims to offer an instant hangover cure for vacationers keen to avoid missing even one day of their expensive holiday:

I am asked to rate my symptoms — nausea, headache, anxiety, and overall hangover severity — on a scale from 1 to 10; the medics determine my hangover is severe enough to warrant the ‘Rapture Package,’ the most expensive one on the menu. I am hooked up to an oxygen tank, and an IV is inserted into my right arm, where I receive an anti-emetic (to keep me from vomiting), an anti-inflammatory (ibuprofen in IV form), and heartburn medication.

→ Chris Hall interviewed Paul Jones, the founder of Manchester’s Cloudwater Brew Co, and made sure to ask questions about money.

→ Stan Hieronymus posts his links round-up on Monday mornings. Last week’s had a theme, Budweiser, and some interesting commentary: ‘Telling a drinker a beer is special provides an invitation to go looking for those.’

→ Despite almost 40 years of CAMRA campaigning on its behalf mild continues to be an endangered style: Robinson’s 1892 has just bitten the dust, as reported by the Manchester Evening News. (Via Beer Today.)

→ The photographs BrewDog used to promote their crowd-sourced beer project proved a little too easy to Photoshop:

I somewhat think #MashTag2015 's special twists have jumped the shark a bit – #totallydidntjustphotoshopthat pic.twitter.com/SoohUwlti4

— Josh – Slow Hunch (@TheEveningBrews) March 26, 2015