Against all odds (bereavement, Covid) here’s our regular round-up of the best writing about beer and pubs from the past week.
First, some news that interested us because it made us think about where we might be in the cycle: Birra Moretti has overtaken Carling as Britain’s best-selling draught lager, according to new stats from CGA. This, along with the ongoing fascination with the success of Madrí, reminded us that the craft beer boom was preceded by a ‘world lager’ craze back in the 1990s and noughties. Consumers are clearly expressing discernment – Carling simply won’t do! – but not straying too far from base in terms of style or flavour. Moretti is also stronger than Carling and marketed as a ‘premium’ product. Perhaps there are hints here, too, of a little more spending power among drinkers? Anyway, it struck us as a ‘signal’ of some kind.
Perhaps it’s because we haven’t been able to get away to Germany this year that we’ve been particularly drawn to the beer garden travelogues from Franz Hofer. This week’s is a report from the idyllic Waldwirtschaft:
That sweeping vista across the valley below! It’s the first thing you notice when you find a seat in the Waldwirtschaft’s expansive beer garden. Known locally as the “WaWi,” the Waldwirtschaft in southwestern Munich is nestled in the woods just beyond a residential neighbourhood lined with villas. Perched atop a beer cellar cut into an embankment high above the Isar River, the WaWi conveys a topographical sense of what it meant to cut fermentation and lagering cellars into riverbanks in the days before modern refrigeration. Indeed, this entire area was once a bastion of beer cellars… As with any top-notch beer garden worth its malt, local lore has woven a certain mystique around the WaWi, which found itself at the center of the “Beer Garden Revolution” of 1995. So significant was this local upheaval that it helped usher in the Beer Garden Ordinance of 1999.
Wait, what? Tell us more! (He does.)
At Good Beer Hunting, which is still with us for now, Maggie Gigandet has written about the practicalities of capturing wild yeast for commercial use. It sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? And very romantic. But there’s a reason most breweries just buy off-the-shelf yeast:
Three Nashville brewers sipped beer from small plastic cups in the backroom of Bootleg Biology, Tennessee’s only yeast lab. The lab’s garage door, framed by an old red, white, and blue brewers’ conference banner, was open despite the early February cold. The beer they were sampling was brewed with a wild yeast collected from a sunflower. Surrounded by brewing and lab equipment, they compared tasting notes. They pronounced it “Belgian saison-y,” with flavors of bubblegum and banana… Chad Mueller, head brewer at TennFold—who, with his colleagues, had begun their hunt for this yeast six months earlier—was surprised by the banana flavor. “I’m pretty interested,” he said. But he wasn’t sold. Did the yeast have a gene that could lead to exploding cans and ruin the taste of his beers? They’d need to test it.
At Substack David Jesudason shares the story of Albert Gordon, Cambridge’s first black landlord, via interviews recorded for a local oral history project:
“We brought an atmosphere to the pub,” says Albert. “It became known as a friendly pub in Cambridge – you could come in there and chat with either me or Lorna. We had a good relationship with our customers. We help them, sometimes [they] ask us a favour – we would jump in a car and take them wherever they want to go… “People loved us – even now people talk about ‘Albert from the Midland Tavern’. Everyone after tried to build on what we started. A lot of people came and saw how Jamaican people lived and the Jamaican way of life – the happy part of our life. One of the things we gave to them is the music.”… There was no food served but there was music. And, boy, was there music – reggae and soul – and every so often a steel band. There was also Northern Soul and once a month rock n roll with Teddy Boys (often associated with racism) turning up. “I tried to get everything for everybody in there,” Albert said.
As converts to the way of Wegbier we were intrigued by a piece at VinePair by Will Hawkes about the European habit of drinking on the move:
The German passion for Wegbier doesn’t extend to all drinking on the go. Beer bikes — a human-propelled vehicle, seating up to 16 customers, who drink as they pedal — have been restricted in Germany for many years over concerns about rudeness and, most unforgivable in Deutschland, holding up traffic. Other countries have taken a similar approach, including the Netherlands, where the phenomenon first reared its head in the late 1990s… Nonetheless, they are still popular, with Britain in particular currently a growing market — although even here concerns remain, perhaps because they’re associated with rowdy stag parties.
Off the back of our recent trip to Essex, which is littered with Roman archaeology, an article by Katy Prickett for the BBC caught our eye. It summarises, in pleasingly plain language, the evidence for industrial-scale brewing in Roman Britain:
Imagining Roman Britain conjures up images of emperors, gladiators, posh villas – and the army that held the empire together… But a much more varied story is emerging, thanks to evidence uncovered by excavations in recent years… Beer brewing was just one of the industries that grew rapidly to supply the military, and small towns and cities like Camulodunum (Colchester) and Verulamium (St Albans) in the three-and-a-half centuries of Roman rule… Evidence of brewing on an industrial level was discovered at a Roman villa at North Fleet in Kent, and using the features found there – such as malting ovens and lined tanks for steeping the grain – archaeologists knew what to look for at smaller sites.
Finally, from BlueSky…
Tonight I'm drinking keg-conditioned Best Bitter in an industrial estate in the former capital of West Germany.
— Ben Palmer (@johnzee7.bsky.social) Aug 16, 2024 at 17:54
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For more good reading check out Alan McLeod’s round-up from Thursday.