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Status update

We’re on holiday, in case you’d wondered. We’re equipped to blog once we get wireless access (lots to update on from Cologne, Mainz and Heidelberg) but for now, we’re stuck with a computer in the hotel reception…

By the way — anyone noticed any weird problems with our comments system or links from the blog pointing to a spam search engine?

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Beer history design london photography

More pub livery in London

Two more bits of old pub livery spotted on Mare Street in Hackney at the weekend.

The Cock Taver, Hackney, with old Truman livery advertising London Stout and Burton Brewed Beers

Courage stouts and ales -- a tiled advertisement on a pub in Hackney

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Crowdsourcing Breweries

This post at Springwise was brought to our attention by our chum Charlie.

The gist of it is, a company is starting a brewery and, for a fee, you can buy your way into the decision making process. All the decisions, from the timetable for opening to the recipes for the beers it brews, will be decided by the members of the trust.

This is what, in the modern vernacular, is known as crowdsourcing.

This is similar to what happened at AFC WImbledon, an English football club which was bought by its fans a few years back, and there’s a similar brewery already operating in New Zealand (Kieran — have you come across this lot?).

Is this the answer to all those beer geeks who think they know better than brewers..?

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beer in fiction / tv

The Dude and Catastrophe, Achewood, California

Chris Onstad has written a new Achewood comic strip almost every day since 2001. Achewood is the story of a bunch of stuffed toys and pets struggling with seasonally affected depression, baldness and vast wealth in a fictional suburb of Los Angeles.

Why mention it here?

Onstad is on record as a fan of Fuller’s 1845, which he wrote about on his blog after a trip to London in 2004. Good food, pubs and boozing are a constant theme in the strip.

And Onstad’s Anglophilia is expressed in the strip through the character of Cornelius Bear (Mr Bear) — a plummy, well-educated old cove who runs a pub: The Dude and Catastrophe. Like most of the characters in the strip, Cornelius also has a blog. There are some great observations therein on the philosophy and business of running a 21st century boozer.

Let me put all of that another way: Achewood is very funny. You should read it, if you don’t already.

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Generalisations about beer culture News

How much is too much?

The Department of Health today launched a £6m “know your limits” campaign, the point of which is to make people aware of how much they’re actually consuming. Interestingly, the scenarios it highlights are very “middle-class”, i.e it’s aimed at the middle-aged couple sharing a bottle of wine at home, rather than binge-drinking teenagers.

As the press-release points out, most people are unaware of how many units of alcohol are in their usual tipple. And so here’s a handy units calculator from the NHS, which incorporates strength and portion size.

There are two problems with this campaign. Firstly, it features one of the most seductive pints of lager I’ve ever seen in my life and had me craving lager at 7am when I saw it on breakfast telly. (Time to wonder about being an alcoholic again?)

The second, more serious problem, is that many British people’s reaction to being told what their limits are is to question the science. Perhaps correctly, because as Zythophile pointed out a while ago, the evidence supporting the current limits (2-3 per day for women, 3-4 per day for men) is not exactly conclusive. And certainly compared to what the average Brit actually drinks on a Friday night, it seems extremely low.

Then again, when I come back from the continent, these “limits” seem perfectly sensible, and I become convinced that we Brits drink too much.

I wouldn’t want to get accused of neo-Prohibitionism, and we’ve expressed on many occasions our view that “binge-drinking” is nothing new in our culture. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for some sensible reflection and education about exactly what we’re consuming.

Boak (up to four units already tonight…oops!)