Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer and pubs from the past week. This time we’ve got festivals, malt, Kölsch and more.
First, some news: AB-InBev is closing the Elysian brewing facility in Seattle. Now, we don’t generally jump on every item of news from the US (it’s not our beat) but, as Jeff Alworth explains, this is significant as a sign of a wider shift in the market: ‘Big beer is done with craft.’ We’ve all spent so much of the past decade talking and thinking about small breweries being taken over by multinationals that it hasn’t dawned on everyone that we’re in a new phase:
With ABI sales of eight breweries last year and Molson Coors dumping four of their breweries a few months ago, we can call 2024 the final chapter in ‘corporate craft’ era of American brewing. ABI will no doubt radically scale back Elysian’s offerings going forward to streamline production, distribution, and sales. In 2020, ABI purchased Craft Brew Alliance for a single beer, Kona Big Wave, which is now a standalone brand in their portfolio. I would expect them to strip Elysian of everything but Space Dust going forward… This was never a great union. National breweries and small, regional breweries have not just different business models, but nearly opposing reasons for being. since this is the end of the line for these relationships, it’s worth doing a bit of forensic work to understand why they didn’t work.
For Pellicle Pete Brown has written about Baird’s Malt in Essex, with a particular view on the future of the malting industry in the face of climate change:
It’s January 2024 and I’m on the train back to my new home in Norwich. It’s a cold, blue day, and winter light fills the carriage. I look up from my laptop and see that we’re speeding past a beautiful lake, the sun shimmering on its surface. I knew about the Norfolk Broads, but I never knew about lakes like this!… Quickly, I stab at my phone and bring up Google Maps. I want to see exactly where we are so I can bring Liz back here for a lakeside picnic in the summer. When the app responds, I’m momentarily disorientated. The blue dot informs me that my immediate location is surrounded not by blue, but green and gold. This is not a lake. It is—or was—farmland. Somewhere under all that water is what was supposed to be the 2024 winter barley crop.
Roy at Quare Swally has an impassioned piece about the importance of the Belfast Beer and Cider Festival to a place whose indie beer scene has struggled to establish itself in the past half century:
It was a time pre-Covid, pre-Ukraine war, pre-Liverpool winning the Premier League. It was also a time when you could get a decent beer in Belfast for well under £7. That time was 2018 and that’s when the last Belfast Beer and Cider festival took place – until now. For reasons we won’t go into here, there’s been no such CAMRA NI-organised festival since 2018 and it was great to see it returning, now at Banana Block, opposite Boundary Brewing on the Newtownards Road… If there was no appetite for a Belfast Beer Festival, it simply would not exist. The reason such an event happens is because people want it to happen. The drinkers of Belfast and Northern Ireland made the festival a success… There’s also something special occurring across the wider beer scene in Northern Ireland. The festival proved, as if we needed reminding, that more people are embracing independent beer and seeking a better range of styles. The festival didn’t sell Guinness, Carlsberg, Harp, Madri or Tennent’s. It didn’t have what NI hospitality chiefs are telling others is our “taste profile”, yet the place was rammed.
Jane Stuart has been exploring again. This time, she’s been checking out the pubs of Harrogate in North Yorkshire, and it’s more about the photos than the words, really, although there’s poetry in those snippets, too:
We were intrigued by the front door – had this previously been a prison door? I enquired of the barman, who confirmed that the door had been custom-made for the pub. This was in fitting with the general quirkiness of Harrogate that was endearing me to this wonderful spa town… I must point out that there was absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever with the condition of the toilets… The friendly barman remembered us from earlier and I told him that we were back after visiting seven pubs because his beer was the best (I had that lush liquorice porter again)…
We’re bothered by the lack of a definitive, detailed history of Kölsch, the unique top-fermented lager-like beer of Cologne. We may have dropped hints to this effect at various times, hoping that someone like Andreas Krennmair, who has ability to read sources in the original German, might take on the job. Now, on his blog, he’s shared notes on how to brew a pre-World-War-II version of Kölsch, with historical notes on the side:
Johannes Olberg’s book Moderne Braumethoden from 1927 contains a multitude of recipes for more than 50 different beer styles. One of them is Kölsch, briefly discussed as the “national drink” of Cologne, and characterised as golden, thirst-quenching, “not too heavy but digestible” beer. The recipe is particularly interesting because it’s the only well-documented Kölsch recipe I’m aware of from before the end of World War 2… A lot has changed since then, and the Kölsch of 2024 is of course very different from Kölsch about 100 years earlier. Even the modern standards of what Kölsch is supposed to be, the “Kölsch-Konvention”, was only developed from 1981 onwards, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office signed off on in it 1985, and it was finally signed by 24 Kölsch breweries in 1986.
A few weeks ago Time Out published a guide to London’s best pubs that made everyone angry. In response, we said: “Remember, if you see a list in a newspaper you don’t like, that’s nature’s way of telling you to make your own list. (We would like to read your list.)” To our delight Tommy Palmer, a Belfast man in London, has done exactly that. Some of these pubs wouldn’t make our list, and some pubs we like aren’t included. But there are also lots here that we’d now like to visit thanks to Tommy’s short, evocative descriptions:
The Auld Shillelagh serves all the standard drinks that you might expect from an Irish pub, and although I’m not really a Guinness drinker, I have been reliably informed that they pour it well… Once when I was in there on a Friday night a proper seafood seller was coming round, so I helped myself to a little pot of prawn cocktail. My only experience of the classic pub fish man, but it made me wish it was still common… It also serves Nordie Tayto, which as you’ll see is a recurring theme when it comes to pubs that I enjoy.
Finally, from BlueSky, a proper thread from one of our favourite beer historians…
Michael Jackson did great work, but he also left the beer community permanently confused about stone beer. The problem is the Beer Hunter episode where he visits Rauchenfels in Franconia to see their stone beer. What's truly weird is that everything he said was true, and yet it's deceived everyone.
— Lars Marius Garshol (@larsga.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 8:23 PM
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For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.