Funny how it always seems to be Saturday around this time of the week, innit? Here’s our regular round-up of recommended beer-related reading from the last week.
→ First, a public service announcement: Bristol’s Wiper & True have issued a product recall for their beer Mount Hood (Batch 01, bottled 27/03/2015–17/04/2015) because some bottles have shattered under excessive internal pressure.
→ Jeff Alworth’s piece on German wheat beer for All About Beer is a good read for those interested in recreating the style at home, as well as offering a nice portrait of the Schneider Brewery:
Schneider is known for its phenols… which Drexler describes as “spicy-tasting, like clove and nutmeg.”… That flavor doesn’t come accidentally—or easily. There are two steps, and the most important is what’s known as a “ferulic acid rest.”
→ A newswire story (Agence France-Presse) via the Guardian detailed the workings of a self-service pub in a village in the Czech Republic:
All beer lovers need to do is grab a cup from the storage rack, insert a coin and run their ID through a scanner to prove they are over the drinking age of 18 to help themselves to a cool, crisp pint.
→ At his Inside Beer website Jeff Evans shared a piece by Mark Tranter of Burning Sky explaining how and why he came up with his flagship beer Saison à la Provision, with some interesting details:
Having new oak was something I chose, despite the fact that the beer may not have been exactly as I wanted from day one. The first couple of batches had a coconut-like flavour that you get from new oak, which also imparts a level of apparent sweetness (not particularly desirable in saisons).
→ For the Morning Advertiser, Pete Brown explained the appeal of craft beer to women and urged the wider industry to borrow its cunning tactic of — wait for it — ‘not insulting or alienating them’.
→ Manchester Brew Expo took place last weekend and inspired posts from Connor ‘Beer Battered’ Murphy (a kind of pre-event trailer); Tandleman (impressed by Cloudwater, became ‘relaxed’, stop taking notes); Mark ‘Beer Compurgation’ Johnson (a photo essay); and Phil Hardy who found it a heartening experience: ‘I felt that dark cloud lift for a while, thinning and rising ever higher, bright warming rays starting to peep through the gaps.’
→ UPDATE 15:24 30/05/2015: Beer distributor Yvan Seth wrote a blog post explaining ‘Gross Profit — Why £6 is a Good Price for a Pint of Gamma Ray‘ and then a follow-up piece on ‘The Impact of Duty/Excise on the Price of a Pint‘. (We bookmarked this meaning to include it but something went awry in the process.)
→ And, finally, a sign of the times from Keith Flett:
There is now a black ipa sauce.. pic.twitter.com/9GMPdRWkHp
— keith flett (@kmflett) May 26, 2015