News, nuggets and longreads 29 June 2024: The Mean Season

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time we’ve got normal blokes, brut IPA and Dorito beer.

First, some news about BrewDog. Its Waterloo megabar has been the focus of negative stories for months now. The latest is about the firing of an Asian member of staff who was distressed to find members of a far right group drinking in the bar on their way to a protest:

The former staff member said members of the EDL had gathered unchallenged at the “punk” brewer’s flagship bar in Waterloo, ahead of a rally to mark St George’s Day on 23 April… BrewDog… is understood to have been informed by police a day earlier that EDL members were likely to gather in the Waterloo area and might visit the bar. Police told the company not to close the venue and offered assurances that officers would be present… [The staff member] said staff were not told about this and said the lack of advance warning was a factor in her reaction.

What message does this send about BrewDog as a brand? That its bars are welcoming to the far right and that it lacks the capacity to look after the wellbeing of its staff in very basic ways. It feels a long way from the reputation it enjoyed a decade ago.

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The most thought-provoking piece this week came from Ella Doyle at Time Out. It’s an outside-the-bubble view of where UK craft beer is at in 2024 with plenty of acute observations, like this from a London bar manager:

Somewhere along the line, a new trend started to sweep through London. Squaring up to the bearded, beanie-wearing men in shorts was a new kind of counterculture: the normal bloke… The normal bloke was not interested in skinny jeans, nor plum sours. He’d go for a packet of scampi fries over the chorizo bar snacks. He ordered a round of lagers, filmed himself outside the Blue Posts, and fancied a fry up on the weekend… Having alternative tastes was no longer cool; instead, trendy Londoners were being obsessively, aggressively mainstream… It was partly a generational thing (as [beer writer Pete] Brown says, ‘craft beer drinkers were suddenly in their 40s’), partly another passing trend, but the interest for fancy craft beer was waning. Rising from its ashes was a different drink: Guinness. We were (still are) obsessed with the stuff. And with it, classic lagers, John Smiths and a shit load of ‘Mediterranean lager’.

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Whatever became of Brut IPA? At Beer Diary Phil Cook has some thoughts based on his own experience in the New Zealand beer industry and from a review of blog posts from 2018:

From a candidate for “next big thing” to the endangered species list in a matter of months. What went wrong? Where did they go?… The reference to the champagne type went over a lot of heads — and even if someone knew that the “brut” version is dry, they might not know that it means dry and so would miss what it implied about the beer. There had also (in New Zealand at least) been quite a few wine-beer hybrids kicking around in the few years before, so people often wondered if this was another. And I saw lots of folks assume that the term signaled strength or intensity — as in “brute” or “brutal” — which definitely isn’t what these beers were, and wasn’t what a lot of people wanted after years of extreme IPAs (as proven by the rise of NEIPA)… The alternate history I wonder about is whether the “style” would’ve survived longer if it’d simply been called Dry IPA: simpler, easier to grasp and harder to confuse with anything else, and still a strong contrast with the other main varieties on offer at the time…

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At Craft Beer & Brewing Joe Stange has written an article that might almost have been designed to make people mad: how do you brew beer with tortilla chips? As you might expect if you know his work, however, it’s actually a very thoughtful piece:

Tortilla chips are just fried corn tortillas, obviously—or pressed and fried masa harin – and before corn becomes masa, it goes through a process called nixtamalization. That is, the dried corn soaks in an alkaline solution—usually with lime, a.k.a. calcium hydroxide – to become something that’s more edible, nutritious, and easily ground into flour. As with pretzels and lye, that solution is also a big part of what gives corn tortillas and chips their flavor… Not surprisingly—considering there are upwards of 9,500 breweries in the United States, and the sheer laws of probability dictate that a few of them are trying out whatever is the most ridiculous thing you can imagine even as you read this – some brewers have been using nixtamalized corn with intention.

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We liked this recent post from Alistair Reece about one of his local breweries because it (a) contains pictures of pretty glasses of beer; (b) highlights something that Czech-style beer dispense is something missing from the UK beer scene; and (c) tells a story about the feedback loop between drinkers and brewers:

Nearly two years ago I got my act together to visit a few local Charlottesville area breweries that I had heard glowing reviews of, including Selvedge Brewing in their old Woolen Mills location… The driving force behind that first visit was that they had recently hired a new brewer, who… was a fellow fan of central European lagers. Naturally then, Josh and I talked at length that visit about decoction mashing, extended lagering, and the joys of doing things the old school way… A few weeks back Josh did a double decoction with Moravian malt, chucked some Bohemian hops into the boil, and even got hands on the lauded H strain of yeast from Pilsner Urquell to make Coat Czech, his version of a 12° světlý ležák (pale lager to you). Josh was recently in Czechia, visiting many of the best pubs and breweries in both Prague and Plzeň – I may have given him several pointers – and this beer was the outcome of drinking in the home of great pale lagers.

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David Bailey creates cartoons for Pellicle and this week’s piece offers some brutal observations about the typical owners of the typical craft brewery:

We’re just 3 guys making beers we want to drink… hazy, juicy, hoppy beers… I was an engineer… I was a graphic designer… I was in tech and a keen home brewer… Our logo is a hop beard with sunglasses… It looks like us…

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Finally, from BlueSky…

Now then

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— TenInchWheels (@teninchwheels.bsky.social) Jun 28, 2024 at 22:36

For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.