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Craft Beer on the High Street

Cover of the Homebrew Handbook.Future Publishing, best known for producing magazines about computers and music, has just published a chunky one-off ‘bookazine’ about home brewing.

It caught our interest largely because of the signal it sends about the status of beer: this must surely be the first time since the eighties that a guide to brewing at home has been available in WH Smith. It is also, we hear, on sale in many supermarkets.

It is notable, too, that the cover boasts ‘50 craft beer recipes’, and has the subtitle ‘How to make the craft beer you love at home!’ Had it been published ten years ago, would it not probably have used the buzz-phrase ‘real ale’ instead?

We also have an inkling that there are more ‘craft beer’ related publications on their way from Future — perhaps a more general guide to appreciating beer based on hints dropped here and there. An interesting development if we’re right.

Should you buy it?

If you have been thinking about getting into home brewing, you could certainly do worse.

It is clear and colourful, and makes the process seem less intimidating than some other guides, and plenty of demonstration photos (with a spectacularly glum-looking reluctant model) help on that front.

If you’re a more experienced brewer, you might still be interested in getting your hands on the recipes which make up the bulk of its 172 pages.

First, there are those donated by breweries, most of whom seem to have recognised this as an opportunity for a free full-page advertisement in exchange for the secrets of one of their more obscure or less-exciting products. So, for example, St Austell’s contribution is a recipe for 1851 IPA, a very occasional seasonal we’ve never actually rarely seen on sale. There are some better-known beers included, however, such as Kernel’s Export India Porter, Lovibond’s Henley Gold and Moor Illusion.

There is also a batch of adaptable ‘essential’ recipes covering a range of styles, put together by home brewer Paul Saunders, which look fine to us, and would no doubt make a good start point for designing your own beer.

It won’t be making our list of essential home brewing books, but we don’t regret spending £9.99 on it.

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Blogging and writing

Bits and Pieces for October 2013

An assortment of beers in a box.

Here are a few bits of business that don’t warrant a blog post of their own.

  • Prompted by an email from a relative of Paul Leyton (early UK ‘microbrewer’), we’ve updated the ‘Help us with our book’ page. As the manuscript is now off with the publishers, we can’t make huge changes, but we’re still interested in finding out more on the topics listed out of curiosity, and with future blog posts and articles in mind.
  • The Winter edition of the Campaign for Real Ale’s BEER magazine is arriving through members’ doors as we speak. We’re excited because It includes the first article we’ve ever written on a professional basis. It’s part of the ‘real ale heroes’ series and tells the story of the part writers Richard Boston and Ian Nairn — both interesting characters — played in boosting CAMRA’s profile in the mid-seventies. If you’re not a member, you’ll probably find a copy knocking about your local CAMRA-friendly pub.
  • We’ve been thinking for a while  that it might be interesting to cross-reference all those X Beers to Drink Before You Die books to see if there’s a core group of essential beers that make up a kind of ‘canon’. When we expressed that thought on Twitter, we discovered that some have already made a start, and others were keen to get involved. A bunch of us are now entering data on a collaborative basis. Watch this space for results, but here’s one pre-emptive headline: Pilsner Urquell is one for the ages.
  • We’ve picked a topic for our 30 November ‘long read’: we’re going to tell the story of Newquay Steam Beer, arguably an early ‘craft beer’. If you’ve got any insight beyond ‘the packaging was nice but it tasted boring’, feel free to drop us a line…
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Blogging and writing

Let’s Go Long in November

Beer books on a shelf.

On Saturday 30 November, we’re going to post something longer than usual.

When we did this back in September, quite a few people were kind enough to keep us company, and it would be excellent if anyone felt like doing the same this time round.

When we say ‘longer than usual’, we mean 1,500 words minimum, but we’re aiming for 2,000+ this time.

As before, pro-writers might want to consider using this as an opportunity to give an airing to something from their back catalogue, or publish a piece that’s never found a home.

Our fellow bloggers might want to give their writing muscles a workout, perhaps by conducting research or interviews, and telling a bigger story than they would usually attempt. (That’s how we’re approaching it.)

Or, screw that — just have some fun with a stream of consciousness, personal memoir, a list — whatever.

Last time, we avoided suggesting a Twitter hashtag because, ugh, hashtags, but several innocent bystanders did suggest they’d have welcomed an easy way to find people’s contributions. With that in mind, how do people feel about #beerylongreads?

Now, with astounding arrogance, we present some tips and ideas…

  1. If you pick a big subject, you’ll sail to 1,500 words.
  2. Alternatively, pick a small subject, but go into ludicrous detail —  perhaps tell the story of a single grain of malt.
  3. Or go high concept: present a review of a single beer as a round table discussion between ten historical figures.
  4. Go to the library and skim a few books or old newspapers. You’re bound to find a story worth telling.
  5. Michael ‘Beer Hunter’Jackson’s first writing gig was a column called This is Your Pub in a local paper in Yorkshire — why not paint a portrait of your local pub, its history, regulars, and the publicans?
  6. Struggling to make 1,500 words? Drop in one or two 100-word quotes. This is how Norman Davies gets his books up to the requisite fatness.
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Blogging and writing

Book Review: Cooked by Michael Pollan

1899 illustration of brewing yeast.

Michael Pollan Cooked.Michael Pollan’s book is a mix of history, philosophy, personal memoir and cookbook, which amounts to an extended pep talk: cook more! Eat more dirt!

The book is built around the conceit that the four primary methods of preparing food each correspond to an element: grilling (meat) is fire; stewing is water; leavening bread is air; and fermentation with fungus and bacteria is earth.

Pollan’s approach to understanding the act of cooking is hands-on, which leads him to question repeatedly why anyone bothers to make their own bread, beer or sauerkraut. One of his conclusions is that preparing at home, at great expense and with highly variable results, versions of products that can be bought at the shops for next to nothing is enjoyable and meditative: it is ‘adult play’.

This is certainly a fair description of our own attempts at home brewing, and perhaps (no offence intended) even of some small commercial brewing operations.

In his exploration of ‘the Balkans of barbecue’, we found echoes of the debate over categories of beer in the UK. What ‘barbecue’ means in the US, Pollan explains, varies from region to region, state to state, city to city — some ‘tribes’ use sauce, others don’t; sauces can be based on mustard, vinegar or tomato; they might use the whole pig, the shoulder, the belly, or specific cuts thereof. Each region thinks the others is doing it wrong. Those differences, he suggests, are a form of social glue — a way for members of one group to bond, while also excluding outsiders.

When he quotes a friend saying ‘So barbecue is basically kashrut [kosher food law] for goys?’, and barbecue aficionados dismissing the slow-cooked pork from the next town with, ‘Okay, but that’s not barbecue,’ we hear the voice of a Campaign for Real Ale member or Brewdog shareholder: ‘Okay, but that’s not real ale/craft beer.’

Back-to-basics artisan, or rock-star?

Pigs

Throughout the book, Pollan grapples with a few problems which also affect the world of beer, such as the arrival of the ‘rock-star’ artisan. When he meets world-famous barbecue pit-master Ed Mitchell, he observes with some disappointment that not only is Mitchell a touch hypocritical (he uses both charcoal and propane for convenience, despite having railed against them), but is also a walking ‘brand’ whose job is to sell a particular vision of ‘authenticity’ (Mitchell is black) on behalf of the wealthy investors who actually own ‘his’ restaurant.

Some of this exists in beer already, and more of it is on the way.

‘Craft beer’ drinkers will also recognise the tale of how the $2.75 barbecue sandwich became the $8 ‘premium product’: it takes more time and uses more expensive ingredients, and, as a result, only people in suits can afford to eat them, in sanitised, theme park surroundings. With pork products, however, the argument is somewhat more compelling — the $2.75 sandwich uses factory-farmed ‘commodity pork’, while the more expensive version uses fattier and reportedly tastier meat from rare breed pigs. There is no such thing as battery-farmed malt or hops, as far as we are aware.

Craft: instinct and fingers?

There are also various compelling illustrations of ‘craft’ as a verb. For example, Pollan describes a miller knows when the grains are overheating because he literally puts his nose to the grindstone. Of a rockstar sourdough producer, he says this:

[Chad] Robertson seemed to be suggesting that success as a baker demanded a certain amount of negative capability — willingness to exist amid uncertainty. His was a world of craft rather than engineering, one where ‘digital’ referred exclusively to fingers.

‘Negative capability’, just to be clear, means ‘lack of ability’: it helps not to be technically competent. (See comment below.) We can imagine some brewers bridling at that, especially those who seem (to borrow another of Pollan’s pithy turns of phrase) ‘less like… cooks than twenty-something computer geeks trying to master a new software platform’.

Elsewhere, Pollan tells a familiar story of the march of progress and the resulting blandification of processed, industrialised food. He suggests that attempts by hippies to revive ‘whole grain’ bread in the nineteen-seventies did more damage than good, producing black, indigestible bricks that created an image bread-makers are still trying to shake-off forty years on. (We thought, once again, of ‘real ale’.)

‘The cheese and the sex’

When we finally got to it, the section on fermenting was, perhaps inevitably, a let down, though there were a few interesting nuggets which demand further research.

A long meditation on why people would voluntarily eat rotting shark meat or cheese that smells like toe-jam — ‘the erotics of disgust’ — applies just as well to sour and otherwise ‘funky’ acquired-taste beers. After consulting Freud, talking to a cheese-making nun, and reading the insane website of an apparent cheese fetishist, Pollan concludes that humans fundamentally love body smells (feet, shit, sweat) but (except in France…) are then socially-conditioned to pretend they don’t.

While making mead with wild yeast, he is told that they typically ‘crap out’ at around 5% ABV, which leads Pollan to suggest that is arguably the ‘natural’ strength for primitively-produced alcoholic beverages. European beer culture would certainly seem to have decided as much.

We were also amused and intrigued by his argument for why drinking is inseparable from socialising. When animals are given access to booze under laboratory conditions, he explains, not only do they love the stuff, but they gather together to drink in group ‘sessions’, apparently because being drunk makes them more vulnerable to predators, and there is safety in numbers. Suddenly, the pub makes much more sense.

* * *

Though it occasionally tips over into self-righteous disgust at the eating habits of the masses, and isn’t always successful in avoiding a certain middle-class smugness, Cooked is an entertaining, amusing book which anyone who has ever felt the urge to make pickles, bacon or beer ought to enjoy.

And we dare anyone to read it and not come away wanting bake a wholemeal sourdough loaf, or roast a whole hog.

We were given our copy as a gift by a friend but the recommended retail price for the hardback edition is £20.

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Blogging and writing

Writing Style Guide: Family Brewers

Ward's sign, Sheffield.

We need to compile notes on how brewery names ought to be treated for whoever is lucky enough to get the job of copy editing and proofreading our book, and thought we might as well share them.

If you are a blogger or beer writer who frets over your apostrophes, you might disagree with our judgement: let us know if you think we’re way off the mark, but bear in mind that ‘style’ (as opposed to grammar) is to some extent a matter of taste.

If you are not in the habit of writing about beer, or like to do so in a free-form, convention-defying way which pushes the boundaries of traditional grammar and spelling, you’ll probably find this extremely boring. Sorry.

1. Legal names

Most breweries have formal company names which are rarely used, e.g. Young & Co is almost always referred to as Young’s. The only time most writers will need to use the formal name is if making very precise distinctions between different phases in a company’s history, or when describing the foundation of a new legal entity, e.g. after a takeover.

So, Young’s Bitter is still Young’s Bitter, even though it is now actually Wells & Young’s Ltd’s Bitter.

2. Apostrophes

If the family name is Watney, and if the company and any individual beers are supposed to belong to an unspecified, almost symbolic Mr. or Ms. Watney, then they are Watney’s.

The famous brewing company was Watney’s. The beer was Watney’s Red Barrel. It was sold in Watney’s pubs.

You might just about get away with referring to ‘senior figures at Watney’, but  Watney’s is better. Watney Red Barrel just seems stupid. (The underlying base rule of style guides in action, there.)

3. Brand style

Breweries sometimes insist on alternative styles for the sake of branding: Watney’s was almost always written as ‘Watneys’ on labels and in marketing material, probably because designers thought the apostrophe looked ugly.

You might feel more comfortable writing the name of a brewery and its beers as they appear on labels, and that is also a legitimate approach.

4. Family names ending with S

We were shocked when we realised yesterday that the brewing family is Adnams, and that it is therefore Adnams’ Broadside. Or perhaps Adnamss, depending on taste. Either way, it is not Adnam’s Broadside, because there has never been a Mr Adnam.

There are a handful of other brewing families whose names also end with S, and who ought to be treated the same way:

  • J.W. Lees | Lees’ Bitter
  • Thwaites | Thwaites’ Nutty Black
  • Jennings (not Jenning) | Jennings’ Cumberland Ale

5. Place or family name?

Devenish is a family name, not a village in the West Country as we once thought, so, for consistency, should we ever need to, we will refer to Devenish’s Bosun Brown Ale. We’re not sure if there are others that might cause similar confusion, but it’s worth checking if you have any doubts.

6. Breweries with multiple family names

In the rare instances where a brewery owned/run by several families has not come to be known by one name (Fuller, Smith & Turner is almost always called Fuller’s). This is about the only time you ought to use ‘&’ in prose, and only the final proper name in the list needs an apostrophe to indicate possession. In this instance, you might also do away with the possessive apostrophe altogether, treating the brewery name as an adjective, as in ‘Nike (brand) trainers’ (a matter of taste; be consistent).

  • Company name: Eldridge Pope & Co.
  • In prose: Eldridge Pope’s Crystal Ale; Eldridge Pope Crystal Ale.
  • Not: Eldridge’s and Pope’s Crystal Ale.
  • Company name: Starkey, Knight & Ford Ltd.
  • In prose: Starkey, Knight & Ford’s Tivvy Ale; Starkey, Knight & Ford Tivvy Ale.
  • Not: Starkey’s, Knight’s and Ford’s Tivvy Ale.

If you’ve got any questions (‘What about Brodie’s, founded by two people called Brodie?’) or suggestions, leave a comment below.