News, nuggets and longreads 28 September 2024: Georgy Girl

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that grabbed our attention in the past week, from Burton to Bavaria.

First, the news that Ash Corbett-Collins has been named as the new chair of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). We’ve chatted with Ash on social media on and off over the years and he’s always struck as pretty passionate. He’s been interviewed by Ian Webster at The Beertonian where we learn a few interesting things. First, he’s from Burton. Secondly, his arm is covered with a tattoo of hops. And, thirdly, that he has pragmatic view of the idea that CAMRA needs to recruit young members:

“Many people ask me how we get more young people involved in CAMRA but I think that’s a difficult ask when so many of them simply don’t have the spare time, energy or money when they are starting their careers and families themselves. We need to be encouraging our members who are at the next stage in their life, maybe their kids are becoming independent, their careers are settled or they are recently retired. These members are more likely to have the time and energy to get involved in the Campaign.”

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At Beervana Jeff Alworth has written an in-depth piece about Bass – its history, its decline, and its somewhat surprising survival as a cult beer:

I keep thinking Bass will die, and it keeps not dying. It is a tiny brand now—ABI doesn’t even mention it on their website—and yet a surprisingly beloved one. Writing for Pellicle, Phil Mellows details its strange afterlife as a cult classic. Old beers never really die so long as those who love them remain, but it seems like Bass’s modern existence is more than just the vapor of nostalgia. Mellows mentioned a Facebook page devoted to Bass, and it remains quite lively with fans discussing where to find pints of their beloved bitter… People have been eulogizing cask ale for over fifty years in Britain, but it never really dies. It’s too good and there are too many people who still love it.

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It’s always exciting when Martyn Cornell writes one of his ‘Everything you think you know about X is wrong’ posts. This time, it’s the ‘Hymn to Ninkasi’ so often exploited in the marketing of beer and quoted by beer writers:

It’s a claim you will find repeated in dozens – possibly hundreds – of places: that the so-called “Hymn to Ninkasi”, a poem in the Sumerian language to the goddess of beer, at least 3,900 years old, known from three fragmentary clay tablets found in and around the ancient city of Nippur, which stood between the Euphrates and the Tigris, is “effectively a Sumerian recipe for brewing beer”, “the oldest beer recipe in history”, with a description of “the detailed brewing process” that “modern researchers have used to recreate Sumerian beer.” The Hymn to Ninkasi, according to one American publication, “served not only as spiritual homage but also as detailed brewing instructions for the beverage that came to be known as beer.”… Unfortunately, that is all total steaming nonsense… In fact the “Hymn to Ninkasi” (a name evidently first given to the poem, as “Die Ninkasi-Hymnus”, by Heinrich Zimmern, professor of Egyptology at the University of Leipzig, in 1913) is no more a guide to Sumerian beer making than Robbie Burns’s poem “John Barleycorn” is a guide to 18th century Scottish malting techniques – much less so, in fact, because we are not yet three centuries away from Burns, and his language is easily understood.

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The Beer Nut has been in Bulgaria and his report from the capital, Sofia, offer a glimpse of a craft beer scene struggling to be born:

Pale lager from multinational brewing interests rules supreme, of course. And while there’s an independent end of the industry as well, doubtless run by the same breed of idealistic enthusiasts that makes microbrewing happen everywhere, it looked to be under-regarded and showing little signs of individuality… The tone for that was set on day one in the capital, Sofia. Bar one was High Five, where I counted the seating as ten stools and a toilet. On two visits on different days, those were occupied by precisely zero other drinkers. Beer one was July Morning, a Helles from Sofia Electric, whose beers occasionally show up in Dublin. This one, a bit underdone at 4.4% ABV, had a tang of vinegar about both the aroma and the flavour, though less pronounced in the latter. Looking around, I guessed that turnover and freshness were the issue here.

The story continues in Plovdiv (“I wouldn’t class it as an A-1 beer destination… although it has definitely made an effort”) and Nessebar – “opportunities to drink interesting beer are very thin on the ground”.

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At Daft Eejit brewing Andreas Krennmair takes us back in time to the Oktoberfest of 1843. How was it laid out? And which breweries’ beers might we have enjoyed? The names are distinctly evocative:

Singelspieler… Mader… Oberkandler… Knor[r]… Hacker… Löwenbräu… Pschor[r]… Unterkandler… Tölzer… Hesselloher… Some of these breweries resp. brands are still around, like Hacker and Pschorr in the Hacker-Pschorr brand, and Löwenbräu, while others are less known: Maderbräu is probably best known these day through Maderbräustraße, the little street next to Weißes Brauhaus in Munich: when Georg Schneider had to move out of the old Weißes Brauhaus (roughly where Hofbräuhaus is located nowadays), he managed to buy the defunct Maderbräu brewery building and relocate his brewery there. Only the street name and a sign on the wall of Weißes Brauhaus are reminders of this old Munich brewery.

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Is Oktoberfest, as celebrated in British pubs and taprooms, a bit of fun, or utterly cringe? For Pellicle cartoonist David Bailey explores that question in a few frames packed with questions, opinions and ideas.

(These cartoon posts could do with alt text, though. We think someone using a screen reader, because they’re blind, for example, would just hear: “Individual one dot png, individual 2 dot png, individual 3 dot png…)

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Finally, from Instagram, an ordinarily handsome pub…

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A post shared by Steven Paul Collins (@theprolonging)

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