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Belgium News

News, Nuggets & Longreads 14 May 2016: haze, dive bars, Keith

Here’s all the beer- and pub-related reading that’s grabbed our attention in the past seven days, from the science of hazy beer to New York dive bars.

→ Let’s get brewery takeover news out of the way: Dutch lager brewing firm Bavaria (confusing, right?) has taken a controlling interest in Belgian concern Palm. The deal includes Rodenbach, itself taken over by Palm in 1998, but not Boon in which Palm has had a stake on and off for some years. We can’t find a decent English language source but here’s one in French which Google Translate seems to cope with well enough, and a brief piece in English from Retail Detail.

Moor brewery wall sign: 'No fish guts.'

→ Right, now down the good stuff. Emma at Crema’s Beer Odyssey has written a post we’ve all been waiting for: a measured, informed consideration of hazy beer. Emma is a scientist by profession and so, rather than give us a bunch of stuff that she ‘reckons’, she set out to test a hypothesis:

[My] rough hypothesis was: ‘haze = hop flavour’. I don’t necessarily see it as an exponential relationship, i.e. ‘>haze = >hop flavour’, but there is definitely a positive association between the two factors in my experience.

Categories
breweries News

QUICK ONE: Watney’s Is Back

Watney's Pale ad c.1968.

Adrian Tierney-Jones has finally put us out of our misery and forwarded the email he so cryptically trailed last week: the Watney’s brand is indeed being revived.

The company behind the revival is Brands Reunited who specialise in this kind of thing — the new incarnation of Home Ales in the East Midlands is theirs, too. They are having their Watney’s branded pale ale brewed under licence at Sambrook’s, reasonably close to the original Watney’s brewery in London.

They seem quite happy to acknowledge that it’s not earth-shatteringly flavoursome but nor is it an attempt to recreate the original less-than-admired beers. This new version of Watney’s Pale contains US hops which, according to tasting notes by Annabel Smith, ‘smacked of pine, and spice’. It’ll be on cask at first with keg to follow.

So, interesting, but not as interesting (to us, anyway) as a keg-only recreation of Watney’s Red would be, with original yeasts and so on… But much, much more commercially intelligent.

Categories
News

News, Nuggets & Longreads 7 May 2016: Flavour Perception, Carlsberg, Watneys

This week we’ve been reading blog posts and articles about historic beer from Carlsberg, home-made malt, flavour perception and more.

→ For Lucky Peach Harold McGee writes at length about how we really taste things. It’s not specifically about beer but there’s plenty that applies, e.g. this section on balance:

Plainly, this means that if you really want people to experience something in particular, you actually don’t want to have a lot of other stuff going on at the same time. If you have a very simple combination of tastes or smells, then you perceive those tastes and smells clearly. If you complicate the situation by adding more tastes or more smells, then your perception of the prior, already-there tastes and smells is diminished because now you’ve got something else to pay attention to. If you want to emphasize tartness, then you don’t add salt or sugar, except if you want to balance it, in which case you are intentionally dampening down its perception.

(Via @TheEveningBrews.)

→ Martyn Cornell has been hanging out at in Copenhagen and reports on Carlsberg’s historic beer project (UPDATE 11/05/2016 — link temporarily removed as the post has been taken down):

The plan is to to replicate as far as possible the first beer made that followed the precepts [Emil Christian] Hansen developed at the laboratory [at Carlsberg]. Hansen, for those who don’t know, pioneered single-yeast-strain brewing, isolating from the mass of different varieties of yeast present in an old-style brew just the one that made the best beer and cultivating this pure strain up: and Carlsberg, instead of sitting on this technology, threw over any competitive advantage it might have gained, and gave it away to any brewer who wanted it…

Categories
News

News, Nuggets & Longreads 30 April 2016

These are all the blog posts and articles about beer and pubs that have particularly caught our eye in the last week, from double IPA to German craft beer.

→ We can’t resist a style-based taste-off and Chris and Emma at Crema’s Beer Odyssey have pitted all the big-name UK double IPAs against each other, as written up by Emma:

April has seen us drowning in double IPA. If you enjoy this style of strong, super hopped IPA then you’ve been spoiled for choice in the past few weeks. I’ve seen and heard a lot of beer nerds talking about which of them is ‘the best DIPA’. Of course this is what beer lovers are into – discussion and friendly argument about beer. But I am surprised that people are still talking about this in terms of absolutes, as if one beer has to be awarded the title of ‘The Best’ and all the others must therefore be ‘less good’ beers. As if there isn’t a place for variation of expression within a style; as if context is irrelevant.

Illustration of the George Inn, Southwark, from Our Rambles in London, 1895.

→ This arrived too late for last week’s round-up: Pete Brown now has evidence that Shakespeare’s Local was in fact… [drum roll]

→ For Beer Advocate Jason Patinkin writes about South Sudan’s first and only brewery, a source of local pride, that is closing down because of ongoing civil war. (Via @Beer_Writer.)

Categories
News

News, Nuggets & Longreads 23 April 2016 — Takeovers, Spruce, Helles

Here’s what’s grabbed our attention in beer news and writing in the last week, from spruce beer to brewery takeovers, via brewery takeovers and, er, more brewery takeovers…

→ Let’s get AB-InBev’s acquisition spree out of the way first: Italian website Cronache di Birra broke the news yesterday that the global giant as acquired Birra del Borgo. Here’s the most incisive commentary so far:

→ Related: remember when we pondered what it must feel like to sell your brewery? Well, we’ve now been treated to two substantial pieces in which the founders of breweries absorbed by AB-InBev reflect on the experience. First, Jasper Cuppaidge of Camden Town was interviewed by Susannah Butter for the Evening Standard, perhaps expressing more insecurity than he intended or realised:

“Everyone has their opinions. We’re more craft than ever because that gives us the ability to brew more beer ourselves. The beer tastes as good as last week, if not better. Some people want to remain independent but it’s like, Mike there wears Converse, I like Vans. Everyone has their cool thing.”