News, nuggets and longreads 27 July 2024: The Heat is On

Here’s our regular round-up of good writing about beer and pubs, with notes on Guinness, beer ticking, and the word ‘floral’.

First, a general observation on trade news: the individual stories don’t often grab our attention, but it is interesting to look at the front pages as a whole and see who is doing well, and where the problems are. At The Drinks Business and The Morning Advertiser this week we’ve had growth stories from Thornbridge, Mitchells and Butlers, Young’s (pubs) and, more tentatively, Fuller’s (pubs). Meanwhile, there are also stories about the surging price of a pint, the rapid loss of hospitality venues, and the ongoing battle between property developers and councils over pubs. We’d observe from Bristol, too, that things feel quite ‘frothy’, with venues changing hands, some breweries apparently thriving, and the fight to save The Rhubarb entering a new phase.

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Brewer Ed Wray went on a tour of the Guinness brewery and applied his technical and scientific eye to this famously secretive operation:

After its initial hiccup Guinness Zero has been way more successful than anticipated. They are however extremely cagey about how they make it and we had one of the strangest experiences I’ve seen on a brewery tour talking to the guy in charge of it. We only got as far as the outside of the building in which it’s made and most of our questions were nervously answered with “I can’t tell you that.” The smart money was on it being dealcoholised by reverse osmosis. The lack of alcohol means it gets 80 PUs. In Ireland you can get Guinness Zero on draught, an opportunity I did not take up as you can also get Guinness draught on draught.

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For The Guardian beer ticker Andy Morton has written about his hobby and how it’s enabled him to try 50,000 beers over the years:

I got a taste for real ale in the late 1970s while at university in Cardiff. The only alcohol available in the students’ union was bland, fizzy beer. I sought out a better quality drink in local pubs and quickly grew to love the depth of flavour of all the different styles of cask ales… Back home in Sheffield after university, I started attending beer festivals. By 1985, I was recording the beers I drank by ticking them off in the festival programmes. In those early years, I was going to three or four festivals a year. Then someone I knew got me into this hobby properly, which is called beer ticking or scratching – marking off beers you drink from a list… The most festivals I’ve done in a single year is 109 – that was in 2004… The social side of ticking is great. You get to travel the country, and I’ve met some great friends and characters over the years: many with nicknames, like the Alefinder General, Mick the Tick, Trolley Gary and Jingling Geordie.

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There was way too much good stuff this week, by the way, which is good news for the ‘footnotes’ post we also now post on Patreon every week. That has further thoughts on all the posts here, plus extra links, and some easter eggs. Subscribe if you want to read it.

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Because he had a backlog, we get two Will Hawkes newsletters in a row. It was May’s last week, and now he’s put June’s online, too. This one is another cracker with lots to enjoy but especially the more-honest-than-usual account of one London craft brewery’s attempt to run a proper pub:

4 July is Independence Day across the Atlantic… This year, though, our American cousins are not going to have the fun to themselves: there’ll be a degree of joy in Bermondsey, too… On that day, Anspach and Hobday’s six-month lease of the St James of Bermondsey pub runs out, and – as co-owner Jack Hobday puts it, albeit in not so many words – not a moment too soon… The St James is owned by Stonegate, Britain’s biggest pub group, and if A&H wanted to keep the pub going, they’d have had to accept a five-year deal at 90 percent of the advertised £49,972 a year, with no break, although they’d only be paying 60 per cent for the first two years (they’re currently paying a third)… Stonegate (which reportedly has debt of £2.2bn) uses The Beer Company for its procurement, but the range of keg beer A&H have been able to get has been limited to big-brewery brands… A&H was able to sell its own beer to the pub only on cask, but even then it was a painful experience. They sell their own beer into Stonegate at around £70 a firkin (72 pints, in theory), but the pub buys it at £130 or £140 a go. “We even have to deliver the beer direct as part of that sale!” says Jack.

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Jordan St. John has a piece unpicking the meaning of the flavour descriptor ‘floral’. It’s a good one, he says, because it draws on universal experience: “Isn’t this aroma of grass, clover, and dandelion familiar to anyone who grew up in the city’s parks?… Relevant to everyone isn’t a bad place to start.” He then goes on to get more specific and ask, well, which aspect of florality do you mean?

When… grass is cut or chewed on, it releases aromatic volatiles. These are chemically similar enough that they’re referred to generically as Green Leaf Volatiles or GLV’s. These are aldehydes, alcohols, and esters that are emitted, potentially as signals to other plants and to attract or repel insects… In specific, what we’re interested in are Hexenal and Hexenol. In various configurations these are leaf aldehyde and leaf alcohol. Their defining characteristic is that they are generically grassy; they are what you’re smelling when you smell fresh cut grass… Which means, if you’re going to be drinking beer, a beverage made from the seed of a grass and a heavily bracted flower, it’s probably going to put in an appearance. An undecocted pilsner made with undermodified malt is likely to contain Hexanal. It will be grassy. You might find it in beers made with malt from small, local maltsters with batch to batch variance. Even well pelletized hops will contain bract matter; green leaves.

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Looping back to the trade press, we enjoyed this interview with William Lees-Jones, who runs Manchester brewery J.W. Lees by Gary Lloyd. It’s the kind of frank, honest, rambling conversation that we suspect might have had his PR people twitching a bit, here and there. It’s also a reminder of the complex class dynamics in traditional brewing dynasties:

Lees-Jones states he was “shamelessly born with a silver spoon in his mouth” and entered the ‘dynasty’ of brewing back in 1994… All the family members who came to work in the business were able to bring complementary skills – his brother was a chartered surveyor, his sister was a fund manager in the City, his cousin Christina who set up the catering in the managed houses was working in the catering sector while cousin Michael became a qualified brewer… If he were to start from again from scratch would he have done things differently? “This probably sounds a bit arrogant but I probably wouldn’t have done,” Lees-Jones says. “I probably would have worked a bit harder at school and university but it probably wouldn’t have made much difference.”

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Finally, from Instagram, a particularly beautiful beer…

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A post shared by Franz D. Hofer (@a.tempest.in.a.tankard)

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