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News, Nuggets & Longreads 4 November 2017: McMullen, Maltøl, Martin Luther

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that has grabbed us in the last week, from longreads on local breweries to pubs on piers.

First, a public service announcement from Lars Marius Garshol (Norwegian beer personality of the year!) who wants to make sure everyone is using the buzzword of the day correctly:

Kveik is not a style of beer. It means “yeast” or “traditional farmhouse yeast,” but definitely not a kind of beer. If you want to say “Norwegian farmhouse ale,” without referencing any particular style, then say maltøl. But beware that that’s a bit like saying “English beer.” There are several very different styles.


Rivertown Pilsner

In a substantial piece of writing with all the flourish we have come to expect Alec Latham at Mostly About Beer reflects on the fortunes of his local big family brewer, McMullen’s, and how it is reacting to the 21st century:

There’s only one pub in St Albans that still sells McMullen’s beer and that’s the Peahen on Holywell Hill… Over the past several years, the Victorian brewer from Hertford seemed in retreat. As the pubs closed and the brewery had little to do with the public, I expected McMullen to depart the brewing scene and become a hotel or catering chain… [But in] its labyrinthine corridors and out-buildings, McMullen has suddenly come alive again.


The view from Blackpool's North Pier.

Katie at the Snap and the Hiss has been thinking about Blackpool’s North Pier and especially the Sunset Lounge, the pub at its end:

Protected from the sea winds and year-round bad weather by perspex and gloss paint, it’s a huge expanse of a pub, and is nearly always mostly empty inside where the darts boards and maroon carpets are. Despite clearly being big enough to host two wedding receptions simultaneously, there are three toilets in the ladies’ bathroom and the last time I was there, none had locks, toilet paper or a cushion for screaming into. I have never seen a single adult in the “pub” part of The Sunset Lounge.

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Beer history london News

News, Nuggets & Longreads 28 October 2017: Beer Mixing, Blenderies, Strong Stout

Here’s everything that grabbed our attention in the world of beer and pub writing in the past week, from World’s Fairs to Beer Miles.

First, there’s been a bubbling discussion about sexism in beer for the last month or two, prompted by a series of individual incidents and issues, which Kate Wiles has summarised in this widely-shared article:

Sexist beer labels may not be as prevalent as they used to be – but not a week goes by without an example cropping up on social media. The most recent example of “Deepthroat” beer clearly indicates fellatio on the label. Another, Irishtown Brewing, boasts the tagline “Dublin blonde goes down easy”. These examples are both demeaning and degrading to women. Furthermore, they reinforce the stereotype that beer is a “man’s drink” and that women have no right to it.

Her call is for stronger sanctions against offenders from within the industry itself: “Beers that are demeaning to women should not win awards, receive accreditation or be able to use industry logos.” We’re going to have to ponder that a bit but instinctively think it feels quite reasonable — not government censorship, about which people are understandably squeamish, but a setting out of standards amongst peers.


The New York World's Fair

Gary Gillman continues to mine the archives for interesting titbits. In the last week he has highlighted two especially juicy items:

  1. An 1850 catalogue from an English brewer which contains a detailed run down of the beer styles of the day — an astonishingly clear, helpful guide to what people were actually drinking then, and how those types related to each other.
  2. Details of the faux-English pub at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City — a topic that we’ve been meaning to get round to ourselves at some point, fascinated as we are by the UK beer industry’s push to export the pub concept worldwide in the 1960s and 70s.

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News pubs

News, Nuggets & Longreads 21 October 2017: Bad Pubs, Good Dogs

Here’s all the news, opinion and pondering about beer and pubs that’s grabbed our attention in the past week, from spoof crowdfunding campaigns to social exhaustion.

London pub expert Des de Moor has been reflecting on pub preservation, the relationship of pubs to good beer, and his own experience of pubs over a 40-year drinking career. What results is a deliberately provocative piece (the title is ‘Love Beer, Hate Pubs?’) full of interesting observations and personal detail:

As campaigners are fond of pointing out, they are community spaces too, public places for talking and meeting, whether informally or for organised activities from sports and games to political meetings. But the idealised view of the inclusive community pub of the past, where everyone was welcome, is not only contradicted by the facts of physical segregation in pubs at least up until World War II, but by the lived experience of anyone who found themselves outside the prescribed normality of the communities that used them… I reached pub-going age in the second half of the 1970s. I wasn’t yet out as a gay man, but I was mildly unconventional and decidedly non-macho. Most pubs in the small Home Counties town where I lived, far from being welcoming and inclusive places, were off-limits to me and anyone like me, on pain of anything from tacit hostility to actual violence… And I was at least white and male.


For the Morning Advertiser Phil Mellows summarises the rise of the micropub, thankfully avoiding the usual suspects and briefly profiling several Kentish micropubs and their owners:

Ale Caesar occupies part of the former Punch & Judy bar on the site of the recently revived Dreamland fairground, and has been trading as a pop-up over the summer… The licensee is Matt Edmondson, no relation to X Factor presenter of the same name but brother of actor, comedian and musician Ade Edmondson… Fittingly, it’s decked out as a celebration of British comedy and serves three beers on draught from a specially built cool room, plus local cider from the Kent Cider Co.


Citroen van in La Rochelle.

From Wayne at Irish Beer Snob comes a report of a trip to the French coastal town of La Rochelle, famous for its U-boat pens and, to British and Irish people of a certain age, for its role in the Tricolore language textbooks. We enjoyed the photos accompanying the post and also admired Wayne and Janice’s approach:

The criteria for our trip was that it was not beer focused. You see invariably, we end up planning our trips around bars, breweries and things, this time we literally went in blind. No research, No scoping stuff out on Tripadvisor. Nada.


The IndyMan whirl.

Emma at Crema’s Beer Odyssey has taken some time to digest the experience of the hip Independent Manchester Beer Convention (IndyManBeerCon, or just IndyMan) and reached some broader conclusions about herself:

In the same way that some people love Christmas – I count down the days until IMBC and the closer it gets the more excitable I become… But there’s [a] reason we don’t manage to chat to as many people for as long as we’d like to and that’s because I have a problem with extended social interaction. If it goes on for too long without a break I find myself completely drained of energy. I feel physically and mentally worn out.

Further reading: this piece from Suzy at Lincoln Pub Geek compares the twin experiences of the Beavertown festival and IndyMan, finding the latter calmer and less anxiety-inducing. “Was the rowdiness just something I miss out on by not attending many London events?” she asks, or “Does Beavertown simply attract a different crowd?”


People were surprised, confused, and either delighted or irritated by the video above, which was launched by the US Brewers’ Association earlier this week. The idea is that the BA is crowdfunding to raise money to buy-out AB-InBev – obviously a joke, and quite well executed, insofar as any jokey corporate wannabe viral video is ever anything other than cringeworthy. There were lots of opinion pieces and takes on Twitter but our favourite was this from Jeff Alworth who asked the BA’s Julia Herzwhat were you thinking?

The idea, then, is for people to take the campaign seriously, if not literally. Having had a day to reflect on it, though, I wondered what the endgame was. What if they make their goal? What if they don’t? “We’re eternal optimists, so we’re going to keep trying. But if everybody on the planet gave ten dollars, we’d still only be a third of the way there.” When I pressed her about whether they would actually try to buy ABI she gave me a coy response: “Wouldn’t it be a fun plot twist if we actually got to our goal?”


Buster at the Alma, Stoke Newington.

Not much reading in this one but have a look anyway: filmmaker Abbie Lucas and journalist Paul Fleckner have spent the last seven years photographing the pub dogs of Britain for a new book, Great British Pub Dogs, and the Guardian has a gallery by way of a taster.

(Disclosure: we don’t particularly like dogs, or cats for that matter. Sorry.)


And, finally, from Will Hawkes comes news of an interesting development in London:

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News

News, Nuggets & Longreads 14 October 2017: Lost & Grounded, Guinness, Heisler

Here’s all the writing that’s entertained, educated or amused us in the world of beer and pubs in the last week, from marketing disasters to beer nerds in the wild.

For Good Beer Hunting Matt Curtis profiles Bristol brewery Lost & Grounded, putting them into context in terms of both the beer scene and their place in this particular city:

Keller Pils is one of two Lagers in Lost and Grounded’s core range, which, unusually—and perhaps bravely, giving to their current popularity—for a modern British brewery, doesn’t include a single Pale Ale or IPA… [The] German-leaning styles that lead Lost and Grounded’s portfolio are joined by beers including Hop-Hand Fallacy, a Belgian-influenced Farmhouse Ale, and No Rest for Dancers, a Dubbel masquerading on tap lists as a Red Ale. Although the influences in Lost and Grounded’s beers are clear, they also each have a point of difference that sets them apart.

(We probably latched on to this piece especially because, despite having been in Bristol ourselves for several months, we’ve still only just scratched the surface of what’s going on with its beer.)


Guinness Light

This next piece was published on 3 October but we noticed it too late for last week’s round-up. It’s an extract from a memoir by marketing consultant David Gluckman who in 1974 worked with Guinness to work out why nobody wanted to drink a new product called Guinness Light that market research had promised would be a huge hit:

Everything was perhaps best explained by a single young man we interviewed in one of our focus groups in Galway. He described his first encounter with Guinness Light: “I walked into my local bar and it was decked out with Guinness Light material. It was everywhere: posters, and beer mats. There were even special Guinness Light pint glasses. It all struck a chord. I remembered seeing a TV advert for it and I decided to order a pint. It appeared in its special glass and looked pretty tasty. But as I put it to my lips a hand tapped me gently on the shoulder and a man said ‘You’re cheating. You’re drinking ladies’ Guinness.’”


A Vermont tap room.
One of Sarah Priestap’s photographs accompanying the Washington Post article.

And while we’re at it, here’s another piece from just the wrong side of last weekend: for the Washington Post Jason Wilson gives an account of a tour of Vermont breweries undertaken in the company of his beer geek brother where the obnoxiousness of the culture overwhelmed them:

We wander outside to the deck, and as we sip, a short guy in a long coat with a trimmed beard stands next to us holding forth to his significantly taller girlfriend and another couple, all of them in their 20s. “So she had a 10 percent sour double bock, and I ordered a barley wine. And I was, like, so surprised. I mean, does anyone still make a barley wine?” Ha-ha-ha-ha, they all laugh. I hear plenty of wine snobs and cocktail snobs hold forth all the time. But rarely do I get a chance to hear a beer snob in his natural habitat, peacocking in full roar. Tyler and I edge closer to eavesdrop.

“So how long have you guys been into beer?” asks the beer snob’s friend.

“Oh, at least since 2013, 2014. I mean, my dad was a beer drinker, but never anything good.” Yuengling is his dad’s favorite beer. “I mean, Yuengling is okayyy … if there’s nothing else in the fridge.” Chuckles all around. “I mean, they use caramel malt, but at least you can drink it and not be repulsed.” More chuckles.

We’re including this piece beacause it’s nicely written, not because we agree with it, by the way. So often, these articles about the ‘winefication of beer’ are written remotely — hacked together listicles or Hot Takes — and this piece benefits from field reporting and the personal angle. Having said that, it still reads to us like two judgemental beer nerds being judgemental about other beer nerds. But perhaps that’s the joke.


1950s TV.

We first spotted the fictional Heisler beer in an episode of My Name is Earl about a decade ago and have been fascinated by it. For Draft magazine Zach Fowle investigates the Hollywood prop house that makes not only Heisler but also Cerveza Clare, Pensburg and the classic Premium Light:

Real-world breweries pay big bucks to have their brands represented on-screen—it cost Heineken a reported $45 million to get James Bond to forego his trademark vodka martini for one of the brewery’s stubby green bottles in the 2012 movie Skyfall. But even if the money behind product placement is substantial, it’s often more trouble than it’s worth. That’s because beer—which has been known, on occasion, to get people drunk and do silly things—is often used as a plot device that breweries might not approve of…


A nice little story: a few months ago we watched a conversation unfold on Twitter about the beer being pulled in an archive photo of the Oxford Bar in Edinburgh — what was Leith Heavy, and how might someone go about reviving it? Last week author Ian Rankin pulled the first pint of a version of the beer brewed by Steven Hope with the blessing of the original brewer’s daughter.


A thought-provoking nugget: on the one hand, we have bigger breweries aping the look and feel of ‘craft’; on the other, there are small American breweries trying to evoke the everyman appeal of ‘macro’. The lines are grow ever more blurred.


Brewery takeover news: Western Australian brewery Feral has been acquired by Coca-Cola Amatil, a major soft drinks manufacturer which bottles Coke in Asia and the region. (Via The Crafty Pint.)


And finally, via Twitter, a new craft brewing manifesto from Denmark:

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News

News, Nuggets & Longreads 7 October 2017: Sir Geoff, Squirrels, Subjectivity

Here’s everything that grabbed our attention in the world of booze and pubs in the past week, from industry profiles to philosophical ponderings.

First, the Brewers’ Journal has a profile of UK brewing industry veteran Sir Geoff Palmer who came to the UK from Jamaica as a teenager in 1955:

“I’ve been able to teach many people, I have been given awards and I have even been given an OBE which are all great, great, privileges.

“But to be honest, the best feeling is when I go into a supermarket and see someone struggling when it comes to the choices available to them on the beer aisle.

“So I go up and ask what are they looking for. I don’t tell them I have studied and taught brewing, I just listen to what they say and make a suggestion that they will hopefully enjoy. I’d like to think they will do something with that knowledge.

“But in reality, they will probably just go home and tell their family about the old Jamaican that was rambling on!”

We were also interested to read the same publication’s interviews with Phil Lowry (“Brewers have little to bitch about right now. If your brand isn’t flying, that’s your fault. ”) and John Keeling of Fuller’s: “I think this industry here is still too slavish to America. We need to develop our own identity and our own beer styles should be at the forefront of that.”