News, Nuggets & Longreads 08/08/2015

Here’s our pick of the most interesting, entertaining or eye-opening beer-related reading of the last week.

→ For All About Beer, Bryan Roth looks into how better-established US breweries are re-tooling ‘classic’ IPAs so that they’ll have the same WOW!-factor for modern drinkers that they did in the less hop-riddled world of 20 years ago.

→ Craig Heap explores problems with pricing in Cardiff’s burgeoning ‘craft beer’ market:

At the end of July I was in the City Arms after a brief pit-stop in the Cambrian and noticed they had Beavertown Neck Oil on keg, so I enquired about the price. It was £4.15 at the City Arms. How about that? The same pub chain selling the same pint in the same town but at a difference of £1.65.

→ Andy ‘Tabamatu’ Parker — a very nice chap who we’ve met once or twice and exchanged a few emails with — has finally jacked in his day job and gone full time with his brewery, Elusive. He’s marked the event with a long post detailing how he got there which is the kind of thing we’ll find very useful if we get to write Brew Britannia 2: The Brewening in a decade’s time.

→ Steve ‘The Pour Fool’ Body explains why he doesn’t want, and will never want, a sommelier or cicerone qualification:

Nutshell: you are not prevented by price from tasting and evaluating a veritable tsunami of beers in order to formulate your own tastes. Spend the $200 that you’d spend for two or even ONE 98-point wine and you can snag two or three dozen beers of international stature and experience them yourself, in your own home, in your own mouth, not as received wisdom from an “expert” whose rarefied tastes usually will have almost nothing in common with your own.

→ Ed continues to post notes on the Belgian breweries he visited recently as part of an Institute of Brewing and Distilling field trip. This week, it was Rochefort, with lots of lovely pictures of gleaming copper, and some pleasingly detailed technical info.

→ Jay Brooks unearths a Guy de Maupassant short story called ‘Waiter, A Glass of Beer!’ that we’d never come across before. It’s bleak… we think?

→ And, finally, there’s this, which makes us wonder if CAMRA or some other publisher might have thought of collecting all of Ken Pyne’s beer- and pub-related cartoons from the last 40+ years:

For @BoakandBailey – Ken Pyne Standard cartoon from late 90s – when pubs were being ravaged by unwanted "refurbs". pic.twitter.com/Bh96FuxrEx

— teninchwheels.bsky.social (@teninchwheels) August 7, 2015