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News, nuggets and longreads 23 November 2019: New Belgium, Bovril, Bucharest,

Here’s our round-up of all the beer and pub writing that struck us as especially interesting, enlightening or amusing in the past week, from Romanian craft beer to meat stout.

First, a big news item from US craft beer: New Belgium, founded in 1991, has sold up to Japanese firm Lion Kirin. New Belgium is employee-owned and there will be payouts for owner-staff, and Kirin isn’t AB-InBev, so the reaction to this seemed to us, as outside observers, fairly mellow. For  commentary check out this piece by Bryan Roth at Good Beer Hunting.


Screengrab from the iamcraftbeer website
SOURCE: I Am Craft Beer

Remember a while back when Cholanda White received racist abuse from someone telling her she shouldn’t be involved with craft beer? The hashtag that sprang out of that, #IAmCraftBeer, has now become a website, archiving all the selfies and stories uploaded by people keen to show how broad a range of people enjoy beer. So many happy faces!


A crowd.
SOURCE: Rob Curran via Unsplash.

For ViceRob Eveleigh has written about the nuts and bolts of the business of British beer, specifically the murky business of crowdfunding, with reference to a notable recent scandal:

For a few months, it looked like Simon Young’s minuscule stake in Britain’s craft beer boom was building into a tidy little nest egg. The Suffolk-based copywriter spent years trickling investment – £1,500 – into south London brewery Hop Stuff, and his 0.3 percent share in its nascent success was worth a reported £60,000… Then, like a Friday lunchtime sesh degenerating in queasy slow motion to 4AM gutter oblivion, it all went wrong. The writing was quite literally on the wall – in the form of a forfeiture notice from Hop Stuff landlord for unpaid rent.


Bucharest buildings.
SOURCE: Craft Beer Amethyst.

Ruvani of Craft Beer Amethyst has been to Bucharest, Romania, and has tips on where to drink and where to avoid:

Caru cu Bere (the beer wagon) has a sterling reputation for local beer and cuisine, located in a beautiful Art Nouveau building in the old Lipscani area of the city. An inn has existed on that site for over 130 years, and the beer was originally transported in on wagons, so the story goes. Based on the recommendations we’d received, our expectations were high and we’d even remembered to book a table (!), so it was disappointing to find that the food was a little flavourless, the house beer was pretty average and the service was bordering on rude – the classic complacency traits of an established institution which doesn’t need to work for its business. The building is, indeed, rather beautiful, but that’s pretty much all I’d bother visiting for.


An assortment of beers in a box.

For, oddly, Gear PatrolBen Keene, who commissioned us to write for Beer Advocate a few times, has taken an interesting approach to the listicle, asking a group of American brewers which beers they think don’t get enough attention. Here’s an interesting tip, for example:

“While regular Birra Moretti is a relatively bland industrialized lager, the La Rossa is a wonderful German-style doppelbock made in Italy. Clear, malty, and bitter enough to balance the sweetness. It arrives in the United States in very good condition and not as oxidized and old tasting as most of the doppelbocks from Germany and it is relatively easy to find.” — Ashleigh Carter, Bierstadt Lagerhaus


Old ad for Mercer's Meat Stout.

There are lots of things to enjoy in Martyn Cornell’s account of being whisked away to Blackburn, Lancashire, to drink a stout brewed with Bovril but our very favourite bit is Phil Dixon’s account of his Dad’s home-brewing regime:

“It was mashed in a bath, and then the wort was transferred into one of those top-loading washing machines to be boiled with hops, and then it was pumped out and fermented. So we couldn’t have a bath for a week and we couldn’t wash our clothes.”


Finally, here’s a Tweet that will make at least some of our readers wince:

For more good reading check out Alan McLeod’s Thursday round up and Carey’s ‘The Fizz’.

2 replies on “News, nuggets and longreads 23 November 2019: New Belgium, Bovril, Bucharest,”

Crowdfunding for any business = No bank will touch my business plan with a bargepole and/or I don’t have to pay anything to the “investors” who may or may not see any return bar the odd freebie.

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