Categories
Blogging and writing

In Other News

Tetley sign, Sheffield.
A Tetley sign in Sheffield, just because, OK?

There are a few things going on around the Blogoshire and in the real world that we wanted to highlight.

  • In our last post, we wondered whether it was time for commentators to take a more assertive stance in ‘calling out’ the industry. With perfect timing, The BeerCast posted this account of a tiff with Arran Brewery. It’s certainly entertaining, and exactly the kind of challenge we had in mind, but might it not get a bit exhausting to read this kind of thing every week?
  • And, finally… you might have noticed the blog has a new design. This new off-the-shelf theme comes with various bells and whistles including distinctive formatting for different types of post, e.g. quotations, video, audio, photo galleries, and so on. We tested the water with a quotation yesterday. What do you reckon — should we stick to ‘proper’ blogging, or mix it up a bit?
Categories
Blogging and writing

End of the Kid Gloves Era?

/disapprove
By Striatic, from Flickr, under Creative Commons.

Is it time for beer writers and bloggers to stop acting as if they’re part of the same ‘movement’ as brewers, publicans and marketing people, and begin landing a few more punches?

In the last week, we’ve kept coming back to this post by Adrian Tierney-Jones, in which he criticises those who appear to want some breweries to fail in order to free up space in the market: ‘A certain amount of these new start-ups represent someone’s dream… I wonder if there is an element of mean-spiritedness, elitism and sheer arrogance in wanting breweries to fail?’

That prompted interesting responses from someone ‘in the industry’ (‘There is nothing wrong with wanting unskilled brewers to fail.’) and from Pete Brown, whose agonies resonate with us: is it really doing anyone any favours to avoid confronting head-on the problem of downright rotten beer?

In Britain, this whole issue is complicated by the fact that, for the last forty-odd years, opening a brewery has arguably been a political (small p) act — part of ‘the fightback’. Martin Sykes, who (re) established the Selby Brewery in 1972 was elected to the CAMRA National Executive in 1973. Later, SIBA (founded in 1980) represented the interests of small brewers, but also, to some extent, those people who liked to drink the kind of beer small brewers made. There was no clear ‘them and us’.

There were early attempts at objectivity, such as CAMRA-founder Michael Hardman’s scathing What’s Brewing review of the beer at the Fighting Cocks brewpub at Corby Glen, which began brewing in 1975. Unfortunately, with only a handful of new breweries in operation, it just looked bad-tempered and seemed counter-productive: many members felt that CAMRA ought to be encouraging to new ‘real ale’ breweries, even if their beer was terrible.

A compromise was eventually reached in the world of beer writing: people like Roger Protz and Michael Jackson would acknowledge that not all small brewers made good beer, but would rarely, if ever, name names. Jackson: ‘If I can find something good to say about a beer, I do… If I despise a beer, why find room for it?’

And that, twenty-five years after Jackson wrote it, is still the prevailing model. It avoids conflict; it keeps beer writing positive and airy; and ensures beer writers continued access to, and even sponsorship from, breweries. (From our experience, brewers do not, on the whole,welcome feedback’, as is sometimes claimed…)

We’re increasingly uneasy with that.

Perhaps it is time for beer writers to accept that conflict with The Industry is necessary and even desirable. If nothing else, as we know from the world of food writing, eloquently vicious reviews have considerable mainstream appeal, and a few soap opera-style personality clashes would probably attract more attention to beer than any number of glossy cross-industry campaigns.

But we’re not quite ready to be eloquently vicious ourselves. Not quite.

Categories
Blogging and writing

Crumbs from the Pork Scratchings Packet

we_ten_1984
This 1984 advert was part of a cross-industry campaign by family brewers which ran from the late sixties.

This is a lazy Sunday morning roundup of links to ‘long reads’, interesting nuggets in the blogoshire and other tasty crumbs of flavour-enhancer-coated pork rind.

Around the blogoshire and internet

Longreads

Other stuff

Categories
Blogging and writing

Book Review: IPA by Mitch Steele

India Pale Ale No. 1

This single-topic epic by Mitch Steele, ‘brewmaster’ at Stone Brewing Co. in California, contains more information about India pale ale (IPA) than most people will need or want to know, and only brewers will get full value from it. Detail junkies, however, will find plenty in which to wallow.

IPA-cover-197x315We don’t know Steele or anything about him and went into IPA: brewing techniques, recipes and the evolution of India pale ale expecting something, after the house style of his employers, ‘aggressive’ and ‘passionate’ in style. In fact, the tone is quietly scholarly, and reassuringly deferential to researchers and historians who have gone before, such as Mark Dorber, Ron Pattinson and Martyn Cornell. Nor is there any sense that this is a publicity opportunity for Stone: where they are mentioned, it is only where it might have seemed crazy to omit them.

The first half of the book is among the best attempts to synthesise the entire confusing history of IPA in the light of recent work by Pattinson, Cornell and others. Steele acknowledges that some old myths have been demolished without crowing about it, and negotiates the intricacies of the story (the sticking points, you might say) with care. East London and Burton upon Trent are given due attention and credit, before the focus switches, rightly, to America and the American influence elsewhere. All the history is thoroughly referenced, too, with footnotes on almost every page. (If you are put off by footnotes, go and watch Spongebob Squarepants or something and stop ruining books for everyone else.)

Our favourite nuggets: the story in the introduction about Anheuser-Busch’s abortive attempts to brew an IPA in the 2006; the slyly euphemistic admission that many American ‘double IPAs’ have levels of ‘hoppiness’ only possible using ‘alternative hop products’; and another excellent if unsuccessful attempt to pin down ‘black IPA’, which makes it sound like strong, hoppy dark mild.

Brewers and home brewers will be excited by the second half of the book which, thanks to Steele’s industry connections, contains recipes for a startling number of well-regarded recent IPAs, along with historical recipes from trusted sources. We were particularly fascinated to see a recipe for Thornbridge Jaipur, though a little bird at the brewery told us it had been tweaked in recent years and no longer contains Vienna malt as per Steele’s instructions. There are also some clever selections: J.W. Lees Harvest Ale is included as the best present-day equivalent of an ‘October Beer’ (the ancestor of IPA), and their Manchester Star as an example of an ‘East India Porter’, the original ‘black IPA’.

One of our favourite parts of the book is at the back: a short guide to interpreting historic brewing records. Ron Pattinson coached us through this St Austell recipe from 1912 but, from now on, IPA will act as a handy desk reference for attempts to decode the mysterious scribblings of long-dead brewers.

The obligatory last paragraph complaint before we sum up? Perhaps as a result of attempting to be diplomatic at every turn, Steele ends up lacking much in the way of a voice, and the book can be a touch dry at times, which made us wish this had been a straight-up collaboration with Pattinson and/or Cornell, both of whom can be trusted to put the boot in now and again. Overall, though, like For the Love of Hops, it is much more than a text book and well worth any beer geek adding to their library.

The book has 352 pages and was published by Brewers Publications in 2012. We bought our copy through Amazon for £10.44 but the US retail price is $24.95.

Categories
Blogging and writing

Let’s Go Long in September

1950 pub scene

On Monday 2 September, we’re going to post something a bit longer than usual — at the very least 1,500 words — and we’d love it if you, fellow bloggers and writers, did the same.

This isn’t one of those ‘Days’ (Beer Blogging & Writing Longer than Usual Post Day 2013! Woo!) and, whatever it is, we’re not in charge of it, so there’s no need to use a logo, or Twitter hashtag, or to link to us when you post. If you let us know about your post, though, and we enjoy reading it, we’ll link to you in a round-up piece later that same week. (It’ll be something like this.)

We don’t know exactly what we’re going to write yet, but it might be that piece on women in British brewing since 1963 we’ve had in mind for a while, or a history of the Blue Anchor pub and Spingo brewery at Helston, Cornwall.

If you feel like joining in, you might consider:

  • something about a pub or brewery in your area
  • a personal memoir
  • a revised and/or expanded version of something you’ve already published
  • something meandering and philosophical
  • or silly and funny.

(More inspiration here and here.)

Adrian Tierney-Jones has agreed to dig out something from his vast back catalogue and re-release it, perhaps remastered and with bonus tracks; and Leigh Linley has got in mind something about northern footballers and the pubs they owned, which we’re really looking forward to reading.

We’ll post a reminder about this towards the end of August but promise not to nag otherwise.

Yours with faint embarrassment,

Boak & Bailey