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Blogging and writing Generalisations about beer culture opinion

What Is ‘Drinkability’?

That’s a thought-provoking and funny response to (we assume) this blog post by John Keeling of Fuller’s for Craft Beer London, in which he says:

[Beer] from kegs, cans and bottles has got a lot better over the last few years, they just don’t have that ultimate drinkability. That is cask ale’s trump card: if you’re having a few, there’s no doubt that cask ale is your best option. It’s better for flavour; a 3½ percent ale won’t work on keg but it can be superb on cask. For an occasion when you’re going to have four or five pints, cask is best.

‘Drinkability’ is one of those words that some people dislike, along with ‘refreshing’, ‘smooth’ and ‘creamy’, for reasons summed up in a post by American writer Bryan Roth last year:

Every beer, by virtue of being liquid, is smooth. But to declare a beer’s sensory characteristics simply as ‘smooth’ is no better than relying on its disgraceful cousin, ‘drinkability,’ which is essentially describing a beer as drinkable because it doesn’t kill you when you consume it… ‘Smooth’ is nothing more than word vomit, digested in the chasms of the brain, spewed from our mouths and flushed down our collective consciousness, only to reappear all around us, as if some form of contagious disease so easily passed from one person to the next.

Categories
Beer history Generalisations about beer culture

Craft Cider, 1946

While we’ve lost the will to debate the meaning of ‘craft’ in relation to beer we remain on the look out for evidence of how the term took hold.

In 1946, Batsford (as in the pub guides) published a book called English Country Crafts by Norman Wymer. Most of it concerns, e.g., woodworking but there is a brief mention of cider-making:

Maybe it can hardly be called a craft in the strict sense, but cider-making is an interesting old country work… and is, I think, worth a mention… Modern methods of processing and bottling have caused cider, as sold in most parts, to deprecate in taste, while the large firms now buy up the farmers’ apples in such huge quantities that the old-style cider-making has almost died out… There is as much difference between the machine- and the home-made cider as between mass-produced and hand-made articles. If you doubt it, try a glass of each and judge for yourself. Then you will see why cider-making is regarded as a country craft.

Craft, modern methods, old-style, machine-made, home-made,hand-made, mass-produced… How do you like them apples? (Ahem… sorry…)

On the other side of the coin, Paul Jennings’s The Local (2007) quotes Charles Barclay of Barclay Perkins describing himself and his peers, in 1830, rather wonderfully, as ‘power-loom brewers’.

Main image source.

Categories
Beer history pubs

How Old is the Phrase ‘Lock In’?

The Oxford English Dictionary research team is asking for help identifying the origins of the phrase ‘lock in’ in relation to pubs.

The earliest verifiable usage they’ve found is from as recently as 1991, which they’re sure can’t be right:

The elder members of the OED’s staff know from personal experience that this practice existed before 1991, but we have been unable to find earlier verifiable evidence of this term for it. Can you help us find earlier evidence of lock-in referring to a period after closing time in a bar or pub when customers already inside are allowed to continue drinking?

(Via @JamesBSumner, via @WilliamHaydock.)

Our instincts are that it must be much older — post-WWII, probably — and so we got out some books and logged into a few newspaper and magazine archives to nose around.

Online, once we’d worked out how to filter out references to people called Lock, and Enfield Lock, and lock picking, and so on, we found… nothing.

Nor did we find anything in hard copy books — pub guides, Michael Jackson, publicans’ memoirs — from the 1930s through to the 1980s.

There are various convoluted ways of referring to what is obviously a lock in along the lines of ‘the licensee closed the door and invited certain guests to remain for a “private party” with the curtains drawn’, but the phrase ‘lock in’ is not used.

When we found this clip from 1986 we thought we’d got something:

…but they don’t actually say ‘lock in’ in the sketch — it’s referred to as ‘an after hours session’.

We’re currently reading through every single issue of the London Drinker from the 1980s (as you’ll have noticed if you follow us on Twitter…) and compiling an index as we go. We reckon if ‘lock in’ is going to turn up anywhere, it will be in a publication with an informal tone aimed at serious pub-going drinkers, but, so far (we’re up to 1981) it hasn’t shown up.

We’ll keep looking but if you happen to know of a documented usage of the term, please let the OED team know, and/or comment below.

Categories
opinion

Malty

Unlike some (Melissa Cole, p6; Mark Dredge), we don’t object to the use of the terms ‘malty’ and ‘hoppy’ as over-arching descriptors, but one thing does bug us: ‘malty’ shouldn’t just mean ‘not hoppy’.

Malt flavour is a positive addition to the flavour of a beer, giving it another dimension. The best hoppy beers — that is, those with a pronounced flowery hop aroma and/or bitterness — also have malt flavour, usually sneaking up as a bonus in the finish.

These are the kind of things we think of (no doubt via Michael Jackson and others) when we spot that taste:

  • toasted nuts and seeds
  • fresh bread
  • crackers

It’s dry as in crisp, savoury but not salty, and just downright wholesome.

The best of the lagers we mentioned yesterday all have veritable maltiness, as do many of the pale-n-hoppy c.4% cask ales at which North of England breweries seem to excel. Our local equivalent, Potion 9 at the Star Inn, is defined by bright citrusy hops, but it’s that bread-crust and cream cracker snap that ultimately makes it so satisfying — the bun without which a burger wouldn’t be half as enjoyable.

A beer with fairly restrained hop character might allow the malt to take centre stage, and that can be good too.

But some beers aren’t hoppy or malty — they’re just sugary, gritty, vegetal or (worst of all) watery.

Don’t blame malt for that.

Categories
beer in fiction / tv

Craft Defined in Other Bubbles

If there’s one thing almost everyone is agreed on it’s that they’re bored of bloggers and beer writers trying to define ‘craft beer’ but, this week, we’ve seen some outsiders (suspicious muttering) having a go.

First, there are updates to the Office of National Statistics’ revised standard shopping basket:

Speciality beer/ale has been introduced reflecting the increase in shelf space devoted to craft beers produced by speciality and micro-breweries…

Elsewhere in the paper, they specify ‘Speciality beer/ale, bottled’ and it’s that last word which gives the key to how they’re defining it, as the other beers they include are:

  • Canned lager
  • Canned bitter
  • Bottled lager
  • Canned stout

So, Beavertown Bloody ‘Ell IPA in a can isn’t craft but Bass No 1, in a bottle, is — right, got it! (It’s a perfectly good working definition for their purposes and reflects a category distinction which most people will recognise from trips to the supermarket with their, er, standard shopping baskets.)

Then, on Radio 4 yesterday, Thomas Thurnell-Read, a senior lecturer in sociology at Coventry University, discussed his paper ‘Craft, tangibility and affect at work in the microbrewery‘ with Laurie Taylor. (Listen here at 16:25; via @waxingbeacons.)

He interviewed many micro-brewers in his research and concluded that one of the key characteristics of ‘craft’ as opposed to industrial brewing is ‘an expression of their identity through the product they are making’.

A common story I had from numerous interviewees was this idea that they could sneak into the pub unnoticed, covert, and watch people consuming the product that they had personally been responsible for producing… Quite a lot of brewers spoke of the doors to the brewery being literally or metaphorically open and their customers would come and knock on their door and tell them how much they like the beer they are producing… 

In the last 30 second of the programme, the host asked Dr Thurnell-Read to explain quickly the difference between ‘real ale’ and ‘craft beer’, and, with a sigh, he did his best:

Real ale is a term coined by CAMRA in the early 70s… the carbonation comes from secondary fermentation… Craft beer is a newer term, it’s a lot more broad, and it involves this kind of thing we’ve been talking about — skill, passion… it’s not necessarily real ale.

What all this suggests is that in (sort of) real world conversations people continue to crave a term that distinguishes Those Beers from These Beers.