We find ourselves sharing links to certain blog posts and articles time and again, and so thought it was finally time to start putting them all in one place.
- How many breweries are there in the UK? Here’s CAMRA’s latest announcement accompanying the launch of the Good Beer Guide which says there are 1285. Quaffale has the best freely available data and this blog post with graph from 2013 by Jon at Stringer’s provides a summary.
- How many breweries are there in London these days? Our current favourite reference for this is the London Beer and Pub Guide, but there is also the slightly less accessible CAMRA London list.
- Is it safe to drink an old bottle of beer you’ve found in your nan’s pantry? This one from 1875 didn’t kill Martyn Cornell.
- Kristen England on how to make and fake brewers invert sugar.
- Ron Pattinson’s detailed European Beer Guide is a good starting point for planning a city break.
- Martyn ‘Zythophile’ Cornell’s various posts on the myths that have arisen around beer history are archived here.
- Here’s Ron Pattinson on how mild wasn’t historically weak and lightly hopped, and explaining how IPA wasn’t necessarily strong.
- Good branding isn’t superficial nonsense: it can actually increase stimulation of the brain’s pleasure centre during consumption of the product. (Link to PDF.)
- Lars Marius Garshol demonstrates how colour can confuse the tastebuds with a blind-tasting experiment.
- Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew: the story of American beer, deconstructs the Food Babe’s claims that beer is fully of nasty chemicals and additives.
- An interactive map of yeast strains from British breweries with details, where known, on which commercial yeasts to substitute in your home brewing.
- ‘Was there ever a brewery in [TOWN]?’ If you haven’t got access to the late Norman Barber’s standard reference work on UK breweries then this 1874 London Licensed Victuallers’ directory (PDF at Bodleian online) might help — it lists every (?) London pub and all English, Welsh and Scottish breweries.
We’ll be updating this as we think of more.