Tag: news nuggets

Here’s our usual Saturday morning round-up of links to accompany your steaming Weiβwurst and refreshing urn of breakfast wheat beer.

→ For All About Beer, Patrick Dawson exposes the strange world of enthusiasts willing and able to pay ‘soul crushing’ prices to drink super-rare vintage beers, and how they go about sharing these ‘ghost whales’ with each other:

For a beer to be deemed a ghost whale, it must not only come from a deeply respected producer, but also have a scarcity that limits remaining bottles to numbers you learned to count to in kindergarten. These extraordinary near-extinct beers, such as the original ’03 batch of Cantillon’s cloudberry masterpiece, Soleil de Minuit, or Lost Abbey’s for-friends-only Veritas 005, can fetch over $4,000 apiece among private collectors.

→ Rob Lovatt, head brewer at Thornbridge, explains why the Derbyshire brewers aren’t rushing to put their beer in cans.

→ Pete Brissenden has continued his blogging frenzy in the last week. Read the whole lot, but especially this post on ‘intrinsics and extrinsics’. (Pete works at Meantime Brewing and this post, we think, reflects the personal philosophy of its founder, British craft beer pioneer Alastair Hook.)

→ Alan ‘A Good Beer Blog’ McLeod opines on consistency as sameness — a new kind of blandness. Much as we like our beer clean-tasting and relatively reliable, we think he makes a good point about where ‘big craft’ is at.

→ Paul Bailey (no relation) has been writing a series of long blog posts about British family breweries and, more specifically, his personal relationship with them over the course of the last 40-odd years. This piece on recent Champion Beer of Britain winners Timothy Taylor is especially good.

→ A slight piece, but interesting because it exists: wine writer Will Lyons praises real ale and recommends three bottled bitters in The Wall Street Journal. (His choices are odd.)

→ We were strangely captivated by this series of articles by Janis Blower for the Shields Gazette recalling ‘the beer boats’ which transported beer by sea from Scotland to Tyneside between the 1920s and 1950s. ( 1 | 2 | 3 )

→ The Beer Nut has been in Bamberg where he captured this ironic image:

Heh. pic.twitter.com/QTWmIgfBC2

— The Beer Nut (@thebeernut) September 16, 2014

→ J. Wilson at Brewvana liked Brew Britannia:

This book really delivered. I saw familiar threads of information, but Boak and Bailey really fleshed out the details for someone like me, who possesses only an American’s cursory knowledge (despite paying attention like a fairly high-functioning beer nerd) of what was really happening on the ground in England all these years.

→ And we think Phil did too. He’s certainly urging people to buy it.

From the dew-soaked hedge creeps a crawly caterpillar, when the dawn begins to crack. It’s all part of our autumn almanac.

There’s been some interesting reading around the blogoshire and beyond in the last week. Here are our picks.

→ This is yet another fantastic post from Lars Marius Garshol, who’s been Alan Lomaxing his way through Norway’s farmhouse brewing culture:

He buys Finnish 6-row barley at a local store, and prefers that because of the higher starch content compared to Norwegian barley… During drying the sprouts and the hairlike roots are burned to a cinder, and these must be cleaned off afterwards to avoid giving the beer an unpleasant burnt flavour…. To remove these he uses a machine built by a local guy, who builds them out of chicken wire and the driveworks of old washing machines.

→ On a related note, and completing the circle of love (and thus defeating the Daleks or something?) here’s something Stan Hieronymus wrote at least partly in response to a post of ours:

I’ve been building a bit of a list of what might be called “indigenous beers.” You can help improve it and in return you might win a book… To win, add a beer to this list. Or provide meaningful details about one of the beers already here. Or add something to the “What the heck is indigenous?” conversation.

→ The team at Belgian Smaak hosted the last session on the topic of ‘My First Belgian’ and have put together a thoughtful round-up of all the entries here.

→ Pete Brissenden, a young feller who has worked at both Meantime and Camden breweries, has revived  his blog in the last week. This piece on why pubs are like bananas is thought-provoking and funny: “I didn’t include those in this post because I couldn’t work out how to liken them to a banana. Sorry.”

→ Suzy, who has previously worked for Wetherspoon, ponders whether the chain’s new enthusiasm for craft beer will tempt her into the pubs.

→ There’s been another trademark dispute with regard to which lots of people with no special insight or legal training have VERY STRONG OPINIONS! The key bits of information are blog posts by Camden of London and Redwell of Norwich.

→ The Good Beer Guide is out and reports that the number of breweries has increased yet again to 1,285. (Link is to PDF.) People who have been confidently forecasting a catastrophic end to the boom for several years must be getting antsy.

→ This post about ‘Beer Before BrewDog’at Ed’s Beer Site prompted some good discussion (as well as some of the usual axe-grinding).

→ Tom Unwin’s Dad is Trevor Unwin, quoted on p45 of Brew Britannia. We have one other issue of What’s Brewing, the short-lived CAMRA glossy magazine, and would love to get our hands on this beauty:

https://twitter.com/TomUnwinBrewer/status/510553577711226880

Rampant Egotism

→ We’re going to start with what, for us, is big news: every other Saturday, starting today, we’re going to have a square (it’s not a column…) in the Guardian Guide. It’s a good job we’ve been in training because it’s 150 words (edited to 114 this week) — not a great deal of space to make a point, let alone wax lyrical.

→ Knut Albert reviewed Brew Britannia and highlighted that it’s a book with some reading in it, not one full of pictures; and that it’s also just the right size to read on the bus. Thanks, Knut!