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News, nuggets and longreads 8 September 2019: Stevenage, Sheffield, Sam Smith

Better late than never, here’s everything that grabbed us in writing about beer and pubs in the past week, from the Faroes to Wetherspoon.

One of our favourite sub-genres in beer writing is the nostalgic pub crawl and Martyn Cornell has delivered a classic of the form, revisiting his youthful haunts in the new town of Stevenage in Hertfordshire:

When I started going into pubs regularly, about 1968/69, the drinkers at the Chequers were mostly Old Towners whose ancestors had lived in North Hertfordshire for, probably, 500 years or more, and who spoke in a noticeably different accent from the tens of thousands of New Towners, like my parents, who had moved to North Hertfordshire in the early and mid 1950s from North London suburbs such as Willesden and Burnt Oak, 30 miles to the south.


Craft beer in Sheffield
SOURCE: Kirsty Walker.

Kirsty Walker at Lady Sinks the Booze ended up on an organised pub crawl in Sheffield and used the opportunity to make some typically sharp observations of the local pubs and bars:

Kommune… is your typical HWP or Hipster Warehouse Project. The following are signs you may have entered one: you try to pay with cash for something and you get a look as if you’ve tried to barter a live chicken; chips cost five pounds; periodically a loud person starts shouting that the puppet show/comedy improv/ritual killing will start in five minutes; every third person is either a dog, a child, or has a beard.


The Sportsman, a strange-looking modern pub.
SOURCE: Gerald Reece/Brownhills Bob.

Via @pezholio on Twitter, here’s a collection of vintage photos and notes on the pubs of Brownhills in the West Midlands from ‘Brownhills Bob’, with images supplied by Gerald Reece.


The Faroe Islands.

For Pellicle, veteran writer and industry commentator Phil Mellows reports from the Faroe Islands where craft beer (definition 2) is making inroads:

The rock in Søren Antoft’s hand is pitted with tiny holes like a black sponge. Once, it was the bubbling volcanic lava that solidified halfway between Shetland and Iceland to form the Faroe Islands. Now, it’s going to be reheated to 800 degrees centigrade before being plunged into the mash for a spicy, mineral-edged ale called Rinkusteinur.


An image from the Gazette.
SOURCE: BNA.

Exciting news for beer historians: the excellent British Newspaper Archive has added editions of Holmes’ Brewing Trade Gazette for the years 1878 to 1886:

During the Victorian era, temperance was one of the biggest moral, social and religious debates of the day… This debate, played out in the pages of the Gazette, is a fascinating one, with Victorian morality coming into direct conflict with Victorian enterprise. The debate was to only escalate with the coming of the twentieth century, and was to reach a head across the Atlantic with the introduction of prohibition in the United States. You can find out more about this debate by searching for the word ‘temperance’ in the pages of Holmes’ Brewing Trade Gazette.


Sam Smith logo from beer bottle.

Tandleman reports from the front line of Humphrey Smith’s war on his own pub customers, visiting one of his locals, The Pleasant in Royton:

Then horror on horrors. A mobile phone rang in the bar and in hushed tones, after exchanging endearments with his/someone else’s wife/girlfriend or whatever, the callee, said words to the effect of “I have to go. I’m in The Pleasant and mobiles aren’t allowed.” Seems Humph has put the fear of God into his customers on that one. Less so on the effing and jeffing I’d suggest, but all of it was in the context of fitting bathrooms, exchanges about how the day had gone and so on, so to my mind at least, harmless enough. One lad called through to me saying that he didn’t care (“couldn’t give a fuck”) about Humph’s rules. Sooner or later he’d shut the pub anyway, like he had the Yew Tree, he observed.


We’re all sick of (addicted to) Brexit news, of course, but this Wetherspoon story is so odd we have to mention it: the pub chain has cut the price of Ruddles by 20p a pint this week, apparently as proof of the freedom a no-deal Brexit would bring. Except… there hasn’t been a no-deal Brexit, not yet. Rumours on social media suggest this stunt was planned to land during a general election, currently in limbo, which might make some sense.


And, finally, from Twitter…

As ever, for more selected beer reading, check out Stan on Monday and Alan on Thursday.

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london News

News, nuggets and longreads 31 August 2019: London, Lambeth, Lancashire

Here’s everything that struck us as noteworthy in the world of beer and pubs in the past week, from judging beer to assessing malt.

First, a bit of news: Founders Brewing Co has finally sold off the majority of itself to Mahou, having initially surrendered a 30% stake in 2013. This comes in the context of accusations of endemic racism at the Michigan brewery which have tarnished its image in the past year or so.


And another: according to figures released by London City Hall, the number of pubs in the city has stabilised at just over 3,500. In 13 boroughs, the number of pubs actually increased and the number of small pubs across the city went up, bucking a trend towards larger pubs that’s been evident since 2003. There’s also a map showing the number of pubs for each borough – a fascinating at-a-glimpse readout with traffic light colours that we suspect would look similar for most cities in the UK these days.


Old engraving of Lambeth Palace.
Lambeth Palace in 1647. SOURCE: Archive.org

At A Good Beer Blog Alan McLeod continues his investigations into old British beer categories asking this time why Lambeth Ale was called Lambeth Ale:

Let me illustrate my conundrum. If you look up at the image above, which I am informed is a 1670 illustration of the sights at Lambeth, you will note two things: a big church complex and a lot of grass. Here is a similar version dated 1685. I have further illustrated the concept here for clarity. Lambeth Palace is and was the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England. It sits in what is known as – and what was at the time in question – Lambeth Marsh. Grass.


Tractors at Rivington.
SOURCE: Katie Mather/Pellicle.

Katie Mather reports for Pellicle from “Manchester’s Lake District” where Rivington Brewing Co is operating from a farm, producing American-style IPAs and sour beer:

“We do suffer from a massive sense of imposter syndrome,” Ben says as we stand around the tiny lean-to, clutching mugs of digestive biscuit-coloured tea. “When other breweries give us good feedback we think… But we’re making it in here. Are we good enough?”


A perfect pint of Bass in Plymouth.

For Derbyshire Live Colston Crawford has written about the resurgence of Bass, not only as a cult brand but as a beer really worth drinking:

Nothing the various owners of the brand have done to try to ignore it has, it would seem, diminished its popularity in this part of the world and people keep on telling me that Bass right now is as good as it’s been for many a year… There are a number of pubs serving multiple brews around the city who will not remove Bass from the pumps, as there would be an outcry if they did… This suggests that the owners of the brand – currently the conglomerate AB-InBev – have missed a trick while concerning themselves with flogging us Budweiser.

There’s even a poll: does Bass taste better than it has done for years?


Judge with beer.

Chris Elston at Elston’s Beer Blog has been reflecting on what it means to judge beer in our everyday lives, in the wake of his experience at the World Beer Awards:

How can you judge a beer when you haven’t even tried it? We all do it though, every time we go into the bottle shop or supermarket, we do it. We’re not just choosing the beers we’d like to drink, we’re judging those we’re not sure about or the ones we feel we don’t want. These are the beers that lose out, or rather, we lose out because we’ve judged that they are not worth purchasing. Which again is wrong.



If you want more reading and commentary, Stan Hieronymus posts a round-up every Monday, while Alan McLeod has the Thursday beat covered.

Categories
Uncategorized

News, nuggets and longreads 24 August 2019: Greene King, Kveik, Wellington Boots

Here’s everything on beer and pubs from the past seven days that struck us as especially noteworthy, from Suffolk to Thailand.

The big news of the week – or is it? – is the takeover of English regional brewing behemoth Greene King. Roger Protz, who has been writing about brewery takeovers for half a century, offers commentary here:

In every respect, this is a far more worrying sale [then Fuller’s to Asahi]. Asahi will continue to make beer at the Fuller’s site in Chiswick, West London. It’s a company with a long history of brewing. CK Asset on the other hand has no experience of brewing and its main – if not sole – reason for buying Greene King will be the ownership of a massive tied estate of 2,700 pubs, restaurants and hotels. The Hong Kong company, which is registered in the Cayman Islands, is owned by Li Ka-Shing, one of the world’s richest men. He has a war chest of HK$60 billion to buy up properties and companies throughout the world.

This didn’t make quite the splash the Fuller’s sale did for various reasons: it wasn’t a brewery-to-brewery sale, for one thing, so is harder to parse; and Greene King is far less fondly regarded by beer geeks than Fuller’s.

We’re anxious about it not because we especially love Greene King but because it’s potentially yet another supporting post knocked out from under British beer and pub culture. See here for more thoughts on that.


Mystery yeast.

Lars Marius Garshol has been trying to get to grips with a mystery: is the yeast strain White Labs sell as Kveik really Kveik? If not, what is it?

If this yeast was not the ancestral Muri farm yeast, what was it doing in Bjarne Muri’s apartment? It very clearly is not a wild yeast, but a mix of two domesticated yeasts. It doesn’t seem very plausible that the air in Oslo is full of those. On the other hand it doesn’t seem at all plausible that this was the ancestral Muri yeast… Two things seem clear: this is a domesticated fermentation yeast, and it’s probably not the ancestral Muri yeast. The latter simply because it doesn’t seem well suited for that particular brewing environment.


A tea room.
Lyons Corner House, 1942. SOURCE: HM Government/Wikimedia Commons.

Not about pubs, but adjacent: Thomas Harding has written an account of the history of his family’s business, J. Lyons & Co, which is reviewed in the Guardian by Kathryn Hughes. We became fascinated by Lyons while researching 20th Century Pub, because of this kind of thing:

From the 1920s you could pop into a Lyons tea shop to be served by a “nippy”, a light-footed waitress got up like a parlourmaid. If you were a working girl of the newest and nicest variety – a secretary, teacher or shop assistant – you could eat an express lunch on your own in a Lyons without risking your respectability. If you were feeling particularly smart, you could go up to “town” and stay in the art deco-ish Strand Palace or Regent’s Palace hotels, vernacular versions of elite institutions such as Claridge’s or The Savoy. In the evening you might venture out to the “Troc”, or Trocadero, in your best togs, where you could enjoy a fancy dinner and dance to a jazz band.


Wellies
SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons.

Mark Johnson has written an account of a weekend spent at Thornbridge Brewery’s Peakender festival with a typical dash of acid:

I just can’t understand anybody being disgruntled about a little mud. We have worn our wellies on our last two visits to Peakender and not needed them. We wore them in 2019 because, guess what, it is still a festival and this time we happened to need them. Wading through the showground site for two days was not an issue to us at all. Maybe it is because of where we live, I don’t know, but when I see people muttering to themselves about the state of the ground, whilst trying to make it to the toilet wearing FLIP FLOPS… heaven forbid… I don’t know…


Buffy's Bitter.

Paul Bailey (no relation) has some interesting notes on the demise of Buffy’s Brewery (one we’d never heard of) and the problem with ‘badge brewing’:

The closure was blamed on there being too many breweries in Norfolk, and with over 40 of them all competing for a slice of a diminishing market, something had to give. Like many industry observers, I was more than a little surprised to learn that Buffy’s had gone to the wall, but Roger Abrahams, who founded the brewery, along with Julia Savory, claimed that the micro-brewing sector was close to saturation point, and that competition between brewers “had become very aggressive.”


We don’t know anything whatsoever about brewing in Thailand but it turns out to be a complex business, according to this article from the Bangkok Post:

No one but the ultra rich are allowed to brew beer for sale in Thailand. The law is as unjust and outrageous as that. And no lawmaker has suffered the bitter taste of inequality in the brewing industry quite like Future Forward Party MP Taopiphop Limjittrakorn, who in January 2017 was arrested for brewing and selling his own craft beer… On Wednesday, Mr Taopiphop, 30, took Deputy Finance Minister Santi Prompat to task over his ministry’s regulation that stops brewing start-ups from exploiting the growing thirst for new flavours.


Finally, much to the amusement of British commentators, American pop superstar Taylor Swift has been writing about London, including a passing mention for pubs:

 

There are more links from Stan Hieronymus on Monday most weeks and from Alan McLeod on Thursday.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 17 August 2019: Harvey’s, Guinness, Star Wars

Here’s all the reading about beer and pubs that struck us as bookmarkworthy in the past week, from Star Wars to Sussex Best.

First, a bit of interesting news that we missed earlier in the month: Tower Hamlets Council has added 37 historic pubs to its local preservation list, giving them protection against development and demolition. Local listing is a way of safeguarding buildings that aren’t formally listed by Historic England but are of importance within individual regions or communities. They’re particularly handy for pubs which aren’t often especially notable in terms of their architecture, especially after multiple comprehensive refurbs, but which are culturally and socially important.


Another bit of news, from The Brewers Journal, via @longm8: Bowness Bay Brewing has acquired two other local breweries. This is something we’ve been expecting to see more of for a while, as part of the Great Cycle. If you hear of local examples, do let us know.


Plastic footballs.

Kirsty Walker wants to cut down on her booze consumption a little which is why she’s come up with the goal count challenge 2019:

Simply put, on a match day in the 2019-20 season, I will only be drinking one alcoholic drink for every goal my team scores… I go out on Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday nights, and Manchester United’s first match of the season is on Sunday. Of we score no goals, I shall not drink. If we score three goals, I’ll have my usual three pints. If we score eight goals against Chelsea, in the first game of the season…well I’m off work on Monday so let fate decide.


Non alcoholic beer: 0,0

Related: for Drinks Retailing News, veteran commentator Phil Mellows has been looking into the (non) drinking habits of young people:

Remember Binge Britain? Only a few short years ago we were really worried about young people drinking too much, falling over and showing their pants. And now, suddenly, we’re worrying they’re not drinking enough. What are they up to? Judging by the top-line statistics, the move away from alcohol among the young has been dramatic, driving the decline in UK consumption over the past 15 years. A study of 10,000 16 to 24-year-olds last year found that 29% of them didn’t drink at all, up from 18% in just 10 years. Burrow beneath the surface, though, and a more complex picture begins to emerge.


Oga's Cantina
SOURCE: Disneyland website.

Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is a new attraction at Disneyland in California which offers an immersive experience in the world of George Lucas’s space opera film series. Lisa Grimm, a dedicated Star Wars fan, has been and answers the question we all want answered: what’s the pub like?

Yes, it was crowded, even with the required reservations, but the atmosphere in Oga’s Cantina is pure Star Wars, which, for me, is pure bliss, with the added bonus chuckle that those who wring their hands over KIDS IN BREWPUBS will find them standing at the bar here; they may not serve droids, but there are great non-alcoholic options for younger set, or, equally, those not looking to get bombed at 10 am, if that happens to be your appointed time.


Fuggles hops at Harvey's.
SOURCE: Pellicle.

For PellicleMatt Curtis has written a great example of one of our favourite types of article: an in-depth look at a single notable beer. In this case, it’s Harvey’s Sussex Best – a beer that’s quirkier than its name and appearance might suggest, as Matt explains:

“[Harvey’s Best] represents the quintessence of the beauty of traditional English beers,” Yvan de Baets, co-founder of lauded Belgian brewery Brasserie de la Senne tells me in a recent email. “It imparts a perfect balance between malt and delicate hops, a subtle fruitiness, a great body and a fantastic, unique yeast character, due to the magic of open fermentation and the fact that they haven’t propagated [yeast] in decades.”

(We’d like someone to publish an anthology of essays like this – twelve beers that shook the world, or whatever.)


Guinness Extra Cold

And, in fact, from Bring on the Beer, here’s the basis of another possible entry – a love letter to Guinness:

But for me, despite Anheuser Busch’s marketing, there is only one true king of beers. One that I will always rank higher than even the finest, bestest, most tastiest beer of the lot. And I am well aware that by revering this drink, I am putting myself at odds with a lot of the values I claim to espouse; yet at the same time placing this drink on a pedestal is entirely in sync with my belief that quality, subjectivity and individuality rules.


Finally, this Tweet was bounced our way by @IanGReeve who, quite understandably, wants to know more…

https://twitter.com/crossroadssoap/status/1162455703530934278

That’s it for this week. If you want more reading, check out Stan Hieronymus’s Monday links round-up, and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 10 August 2019: sexism, shandy, Smithwick’s

Here’s everything that grabbed our attention in beer and pubs in the past week, from the Great British Beer Festival to comedians in pubs getting bladdered.

Undoubtedly the biggest story of the week, making it into multiple newspapers and even on to breakfast TV, was the fact that this year’s Great British Beer Festival was decisively, convincingly welcoming to women. Here’s how Rebecca Smithers reported it for the Guardian:

Drinks that have fallen victim to crude stereotyping – such as Slack Alice, a cider described as “a little tart” and pump clips featuring scantily-clad buxom women – have been banned from this week’s event at London’s Olympia which is set to attract tens of thousands of visitors… The blanket ban goes a step further than a new code of conduct launched by the campaign group last year… All 1,000-plus beers, ciders and perries available at the festival have been checked to ensure they adhere to Camra’s charter and strict code of conduct, which sets out its commitment to inclusivity and diversity.

This seems to chime with the experience of women who were actually at the festival, such as beer industry veteran Rowan Molyneux (who also happens to be in the photo at the top of the Guardian article).She had this to say on her blog:

From the start, there was a general feeling that this year was going to be different. The news that beers in keykeg would be present seems to have piqued people’s interest, for one thing. It signalled that CAMRA was taking a step into the modern world, and that mood carried throughout the rest of the festival. Take this year’s charity of choice, for example. I never thought I would see Great British Beer Festival attendees being able to donate to Stonewall and wearing stickers that state “Some people are trans. Get over it!”

Melissa Cole also seems to have been won over:

This all sounds pretty good to us, goes far beyond the tokenism and half-hearted gestures of the past, and sets up CAMRA well for the future.


Kilkenny

Liam at BeerFoodTravel has put together a comprehensive set of notes on pre-20th century brewing in Kilkenny, Ireland. A dogged and detail-focused scholar, we always enjoy reading the fruits of his research, especially when he’s battling to bring down bullshit brewery backstories:

The early brewing history of Ireland is often quite murky, and trying to pinpoint the exact position of breweries and the brewers that operated in any give location is quite a tricky job until we get to the era of commercial directories, better record keeping, accurate maps and archived content of newspapers. Even after that point the history and development of breweries is difficult to track, especially beyond The Pale. Kilkenny’s brewing history is similar in one way but somewhat different in another, as much of that history is difficult to clearly see due to being muddied by decades of marketing spiel which has been repeated and reprinted over the years.


Beautiful beer glass.

Jeff Alworth challenges an often-repeated assertion in a piece entitled ‘Are Pilsners really the hardest beers to make?

The difficulty of a pilsner is its simplicity, but the difficulty of a good IPA is its complexity. Brewers must harmonize much stronger flavors, and this presents its own challenge. Figuring out how the hops will harmonize, when there are dozens of hop varieties available that can be used in thousands of combinations, and jillions (technical term) of combinations when you consider all the opportunities during the brewing process to add these thousands of combinations of hop varieties… The idea that other beers are “easier” to make is refuted by all the mediocre examples out there. How many crap IPAs have you had? Is the batting average for excellent IPAs any better than excellent pilsners? Not in my experience.


'Ginger Beer Makers and Mush Fakers', 1877.

Mark Dredge has both a new website and a new book on the way, on the history and culture of lager. As a side investigation, he’s been looking into the history of shandy, or shandygaff, with reference to primary archive sources:

[The] first mention for lager and lemonade that I’ve found… [is] from 1870. It comes from the Spanish city of Seville [and was reported in] Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer. It’s interesting to me that there was a lager brewer in Seville in 1870 – that’s early for lager’s spread into Spain. I also like that it was served with a ladle. I’d like a shandy ladle.


Louis Barfe

If you want something to listen to as opposed to read, there’s this by historian of light entertainment Louis Barfe for BBC Radio 4 on the connections between drinking and comedy.


Finally, the usual mischief from Thornbridge’s in-house provocateur:


For more links and good reading check out Stan Hieronymus on Mondays and Alan McLeod on Thursdays.