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News, Nuggets & Longreads 23/01/2016

This is all the reading about beer and pubs that’s grabbed our attention in the last week, featuring strong, pale, hoppy mild; Brighton pubs; and advice on how to start your own brewery.

→ American writer Bryan Roth suggests that there is insight to be gained from paying attention to the job titles given to new recruits at management level in big breweries:

“We would always talk about ‘share of stomach,’ which is about grabbing the amount people consume in terms of food,” Rashmi Patel recently told me, referencing the five years she spent at Kraft Foods Group before joining Anheuser-Busch in July 2015. She’s the company’s new vice president of Share of Throat, a real title for a real marketing team focusing on AB’s collection of flavored malt beverages (Ritas, soda) and Oculto.

The Victory, Brighton.

→ Rachel Smith’s Sussex, Beer, Now series has reached Part 4 with a guide to drinking in Brighton:

[If] you’re looking for trad Sussex cask, you’ll find it. If you’re after creative new wave Sussex beers, you’ll find them. If you’ve a taste for Belgian or U.S brews, you’ll be in luck, or if you just fancy the taste of London with a sea view thrown in, you can have that too. Put simply, Brighton is a beer hub for the Sussex drinker.

→ Alec Latham has been pondering Wetherspoons pubs, from atmosphere to architecture:

Not only does Wetherspoons claim sites of former glory, but actively builds new pubs. In Hatfield, new build pub Harpsfield Hall has recently opened using parts of aeroplane fuselage to construct the bar. Some of the seating rounds are propellor casings from a Boeing 747. The aeronautical themes reflect the fact that Hatfield used to be the home of British Aerospace. One new ‘Spoons is also currently being built from scratch in Welwyn Garden City.

Tasting flight at the Driftwood Spars beer festival.

→ Marshall ‘The Brulosopher’ Schott has conducted various experiments with tasting panels the results of which are sometimes questioned on the basis that the participants must have ‘shitty palates’ or insufficient training as, e.g., BJCP judges. He and some colleagues have crunched some numbers and concluded that trained tasters are no more likely to be accurate in a triangle test — spotting the odd one out among three beers — than anyone else.

→ Andy ‘Tabamatu’ Parker continues his series of posts on the practicalities of setting up a brewery in the UK with a piece on ‘permissions’, i.e. planning, tax, insurance, and so on. Some will find this useful while others might regard it as a reality check.

→ Ron Pattinson and Kristen England have put together a recipe for an 1852 mild ale which is pale, has an ABV of 7.3%, and contains plenty of hops — another reminder that, historically speaking: ‘The Milds of the early 19th century were big, burly beers, simple, but robust.’

→ And, finally, the big CAMRA Manchester Beer Festival has been going on this week and continues until 7 p.m. tonight. So far, we’ve had reports from Kaleigh (impressed, with some minor reservations) and Phil (festival of the year), along with many Tweeted photos, of which this struck us as particularly evocative:

2 replies on “News, Nuggets & Longreads 23/01/2016”

It’s really hard to get the scale of the venue across in a picture – the picture I’ve added to my post foreshortens it drastically. Dom’s picture is a widthways view; the venue’s about twice as long as it is wide, and it was basically one big room.

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