Categories
News

News, Nuggets & Longreads 31/10/2015

Our pick of the most interesting beer- and pub-related reading from the last week.

→ Frank Curtis has had a long career as a barley breeder, starting in Lincolnshire in the 1970s and taking him in recent years to Colorado. In a guest post at his son Matt’s blog, he reflects on Maris Otter:

At that time, the feedback that came from commercial growers about Maris Otter was far from positive – at every farmer meeting, field demonstration, or county show that I attended, the comments would be the same: Maris Otter was too difficult and too costly to cultivate. “As breeders we should be able to do better” said the growers – and we did. 

→ Ron Pattinson is slowly drip-feeding a history of the British brewing industry in the post-war period. This week, he explained how the tied-house pub management model was good for the quality of beer:

[When] the close tie between brewer and pub for the most part disappeared as a result of the Beer Orders, I thought the quality of cask beer suffered. When brewers owned their retail outlets, it was much easier for them to keep an eye on beer quality. And the supply chain was much shorter and more direct.

Categories
News

News, Nuggets & Longreads 24/10/2015

Here’s the most thought-provoking, brain-engaging reading on beer and pubs we’ve come across in the last week.

→ Patrick Freyne provides a summary of what’s been happening in Irish beer in the last 30 years, with contributions from notable brewers and John ‘The Beer Nut’ Duffy. Interesting to not that, once again, Michael Jackson’s World Guide is cited as a key influence:

Michael Jackson’s World Guide to Beer was his “most thumbed book ever”, he says, and when he returned home he started a brewery called Harty’s. This is bound to work in Ireland, he told himself. “But microbrewing in the 1980s? God almighty.”

(Via @TheBeerNut.)

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale 1981.

→ While we’re on the subject of key influences, here’s Tom Acitelli for All About Beer on Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and how it ‘laid tracks in the American palate’ during the 1980s and 90s. (This chimes with what we’ve heard from hop-obsessed British brewers, too.)

→ Franz Hofer at Tempest in a Tankard provides some food for thought on ‘terroir’:

How can a well-crafted “Munich Helles” from Austin and a helles Bier from München express “unique” terroirs when they can taste virtually the same in the hands of skilled brewers in different countries? … Except in the case of wild fermentations, yeast may well be an expression of terroir, but it is one that has been transposed from its original settings and reproduced in sophisticated labs.

→ It’s always interesting to read notes on ancient bottled beers even if they rarely sound particularly appetising. Here’s Adrian Tierney-Jones on a 1929 Bass ‘Prince’s Ale’:

I caught wafts of Bovril, blue cheese (Stilton rather than Danish Blue), solvent hints, a pungent cheesy nose that wanted to be sherry, though sherry was much more evident when I took a sip. As was beef stock, some sweetness, though the more I drank the more I thought that here was a beer attenuated out of existence.

→ San Diego’s Modern Times beer has hit the UK via BrewDog and is generating plenty of interest. Peter McKerry was excited enough by it to get in touch with the brewery’s founder and ask him a few questions. It’s not a savage interrogation — Peter is a fan, not Jeremy Paxman — but we found it an interesting read.

NOT STRICTLY ABOUT BEER: Writer James Moran has put together a helpful comprehensive guide on ‘How to Annoy People on Twitter‘ (via @allmyvinyl):

Did someone tweet about a few items on a related theme? Make sure to let them know about all the others they should have mentioned, starting with “You forgot ItemX” or “don’t forget ItemX” – even though there’s only 140 characters in a tweet, they clearly forgot about those ones and should have brought them up first. Better yet, they should have found a way to fit everything relating to that subject and the entirety of human history into one tweet. The idiots!

→ And finally, this news might cheer those with an interest in historic recipes and/or in the revival and preservation of mild:

https://twitter.com/roger_ryman/status/656914964909830144

Categories
News

News, Nuggets & Longreads 17/10/2015

Here are the articles and blog posts about beer from the last week that we’ve found most interesting or illuminating.

→ This week’s main event is a meaty, thorough piece of proper journalism by Tom Lamont for the Guardian which uses the case of the Golden Lion in North London as a window into the battle to preserve pubs in a market where the buildings are worth far more converted to flats:

“If you’re a developer, and you develop pubs, and you’ve bought six pubs to develop,” Ingram said, “then one of those is going to blow up in your face. It’s like Russian roulette.” … She told Murphy they must do what they could to make the Golden Lion a live bullet.

India Pale Ale No. 1

→ Martyn Cornell has tracked down evidence that there was, after all, a shipwreck off Liverpool which led to salvaged pale ale bound for India being sold on the British market:

But were these sales in Liverpool of several dozen hogsheads, at least, of India ale brewed by Bass’s brewery and Allsopp’s brewery in Burton upon Trent the foundation on which was built the popularity of IPA in Britain? Alas, there is still no hard evidence for that part of the story: and what evidence there is suggests even Liverpool knew about IPA before the Crusader went aground.

→ The always thought-provoking Maureen Ogle reflects, in faintly curmudgeonly fashion, on how American craft beer has changed in her years of attending the Great American Beer Festival:

The problem is that craft brewing’s ‘origin’ story is (relatively) ancient history to Millenials, ancient to the point of being irrelevant. From a Millennial’s perspective, the beer, the demand, and the “community” are already in place. No need to reinvent the wheel. Skip the passion; go for the profit. The hell with the collegiality and fellowship; where’s the winning team?

→ This week’s brewery takeover news is big: AB-InBev is going to merge with SAB Miller after all. There’s been plenty of commentary and speculation — this piece from the Wall Street Journal has lots of detail for starters — but it’s hard to know what the implications for the UK market might be until things settle down and we know which beer brands are going where.

→ Glenn Johnson at My World of Beer usually posts notes on the now annual Wetherspoon real ale festival but, this year, he’s had enough:

There are some things I no longer want to put up with and Spoons is one of these things.  Believe it or not there are still plenty of excellent pubs around.  Warm inviting places where the landlord will serve you a pint that has been looked after rather than having to wait in line to be served by someone who knows nothing about what they are selling.

→ Stan Hieronymus has an account of an interesting example of what we’re minded to call ‘folk beer’ ‘which got its name from the Choctaw Indians, in whose county the liquor is supposed to first have been brewed’.

→ Adrian Tierney-Jones has reviewed the latest batch of beer books from Jeff Alworth, Stephen Beaumont and Mark Dredge.

→ And, finally, this mash-up of two British institutions, the Archers and The Bermondsey Beer Mile, has potential:

Categories
News videos

News, Nuggets & Longreads 10/10/2015

This is our pick of the most interesting and/or eye-opening beer- or pub-related reading from the last week.

→ Neil McDonald of Home Brew Answers suggests a recipe for ‘session stout’ which sounds like it ought to be ‘a thing’:

A full bodied lower ABV session beer? Balancing a beer like this can be a tricky thing, retaining the body in a beer is harder when you are putting less malt in but with a few simple tweaks and a little bit of thought about the recipe itself it is not all that difficult.

Chartist walking tour map by Kristina Navickas.

→ For the British Library Labs project Dr Katrina Navickas has put together a pub-heavy walking tour of Chartist London.

→ Ed has been digging in the Journal of the Institute of Brewing again and came across a marvellous 1905 paper on ‘The Popular Type of Beer’ which includes a complaint about poor quality bottled beer, the result of a…

“short sighted and stupid policy to rest content with, or even to tolerate a characterless product which is not only far inferior to a naturally matured bottled beer, but in the majority of cases not even a credit to the present development of the non-deposit system”.

Categories
Blogging and writing News The Session

News, Nuggets & Longreads 03/10/2015

Here’s our pick of the most interesting beer- and pub-related writing of the last week, with a sneaky contribution to Session 104 hidden at the end.

→ For All About Beer, Jeff Alworth asks ‘How Wild is Your Beer?‘:

Is there a difference between inoculated-wild ales and truly wild ales? There is. A Brett-aged beer will develop a lot of complexity as the wild yeast slowly creates different flavor and aroma compounds. Some breweries even add a cocktail of Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus, which creates even more complexity. But truly wild ales have something more… [You’re] getting the taste of place.

→ Connor Murphy at the Beer Battered blog has been spurred into a blogging frenzy by the imminence of the Independent Manchester Beer Convention (IndyManBeerCon). The first post in a series profiling local brewers looks at Mark Welsby at Runaway:

I knew I wasn’t motivated by money because, in my previous role, the more successful I got, the more miserable I got. Brewing gave us the chance to leave everything we hated about our previous jobs, so we came upon the name Runaway because we were both escaping our past lives.