After a two-week break, here’s everything that grabbed our attention in the world of beer and pubs, from Autovac mild to pilot plants.
First, an interesting nugget from Birmingham: the long-derelict Fox & Grapes on Freeman Street in the city centre has finally been pulled down as part of high-speed rail construction. Why does this matter? Because it was the last remaining bit of Old Birmingham.
Canadian beer writer Jordan St. John recently visited Brussels and has written a long, entertaining, insightful piece recording his impressions of the city, and reflecting on the place of Belgian beer in the global craft beer scene:
I can’t help but notice how same-y the selection is everywhere; As though there had once been a list of approved Belgian beers that no one has updated since the mid 2000’s. Michael Jackson’s Great Beers of Belgium is that list, and looking at the selection in the dusty shop windows it feels like no one has come along with the gravitas to approve new additions to the canon; it is stuck in amber… Cafe Bebo helps to ease me into the contemporary. It even has beers from breweries founded this century. I order De La Senne Zinnebir and some cheese from the Orval Trappist monastery to snack on.
Still in Belgium we find Alec Latham dissecting the label of De la Senne’s Taras Boulba to the nth degree:
The artwork is a send-up of the two composite nations – Flanders and Wallonia – and their antagonism of eachother. It employs satire, humour and caricature to make an important point: please dump the baggage of the past and let’s move on… Unlike the easy-goingness of the beer, the label artwork is utterly loaded.
We can imagine this making for an interesting series, reverse engineering the branding process to work out what breweries want us to understand from the small choices they make in their graphic design.