News, Nuggets & Longreads 07/11/2015

Here’s the beer- and pub-related reading that we’ve found most interesting in the last week.

→ The problems with BrewDog’s decision to launch their new Soho bar with a ‘non-binary, transgender beer’ called ‘No Label’ are summarised by Jessica Lachenal for The Mary Sue:

Day in and day out trans people have to fight to have their identities recognized and respected. It’s hard enough to be seen as a person, so to take our very identity and apply it to a thing, a product… it’s sickening. The work being put into this struggle never ends, and it’s because of really disappointing ad campaigns and marketing stunts like this.

→ Elgood’s Brewery have been getting plenty of attention: Ed gives a detailed report on their efforts in brewing ‘Cambic’ (i.e. Cambridgeshire Lambic) while Roger Protz speaks to the women in charge.

→ Tandleman has been considering Micropubs in the wake of Moorhouse’s plan to open a chain of tiny tied houses: will they be Micropubs, or something else?

This more or less completely overturns the unique selling point that our friend Martyn Hillier devised, of the micropub being a free house. That notion is further undermined by an intention to have a “first class wine and food offering.

→ Richard ‘Beercast’ Taylor tries to get into the mindset of 2015’s buzz brewery, Cloudwater:

It would have to be meditative, the music playing over the sound system at the Cloudwater Brewery in Manchester… having taken their name from a literal translation of the Zen Buddhist term unsui, taken from a Chinese poem “To drift like clouds and flow like water”.

→ For Eater, Jennifer Billock reports on how yeast-wrangler Emily Geiger is cultivating new yeast strains from, among other fertile sources, pond water.

→ The much-derided Thrillist (groan) has a list (ugh) of New York’s (who cares?) best breweries. Well, hold on, because this list has been put together by an interesting group of judges and, UK readers will be interested to note, includes Six Point, whose beers are widely available in branches of Wetherspoon up and down the country. (Via Brendan Palfreyman.)

→ Some related posts: Bryan D. Roth on whether we still need beer evangelists | Oliver Gray on the cult of craft beer | and Max ‘Pivni Filosof’ Bahnson on why it’s OK to just say a beer sucks.

→ And, finally, more lovely pub photography from Ten Inch Wheels (although, in this case, as one wag pointed out, it does look as if a little man is sitting in his pint):

@HowlingHops Pale at @TheCockTavernE8 . Magnificent. pic.twitter.com/W8zJh2Lf6T

— teninchwheels.bsky.social (@teninchwheels) November 1, 2015