Tag: news nuggets

Better late than never, here’s the round-up of links we would have posted on Saturday last if we had been able to summon any enthusiasm for using the WordPress app on an iPad over holiday apartment Wi-Fi.

→ Jeff ‘Beervana’ Alworth is now a regular guest blogger at All About Beer and his most recent piece gets to the bottom of how Pabst went about recreating Ballantine IPA without original recipes or spec to work from.

→ When we Tweeted innocently that we didn’t know actually really understand what Zwanze Day is (there’s too much going on in beer to keep on top of, frankly) we were a little surprised to discover how much the event irritated some people. In this post, Chris Hall addresses that tension, and also sets out a case for limited edition beer releases being (a) fun and (b) good value. Interesting comments, too.

→ We were involved in judging the blog category for the North American Guild of Beer Writers awards. The winners were Oliver J. Gray for Literature and Libation, Bryan D. Roth for This Is Why I’m Drunk and Jessica Miller for Hey Brewtiful, all of whom have back catalogues worth exploring.

→ This will be a semi-familiar view to anyone who has ever visited the William IV in Leyton to drink Brodie’s beer: the Baker’s Arms pub (DOUBLE DIAMOND) in this shot is now a branch of the bookmaker Paddy Power. (Via @teninchwheels.)

https://twitter.com/SmokeOs/status/518830206082351104

→ There have apparently been several attempts to produce a Great British Brew Off TV show but, so far, none has made it to air. In the Netherlands, however, competitive celebrity brewing show (and Grolsch advertorial) Brouwersch has just hit the air. Here’s a trailer. (Via @andrewdrinks.)

→ It’s not beer-related but there’s plenty of food for thought for bloggers in this piece reflecting on lessons learned from fifteen years of blogging by veteran Anil Dash:

The most meaningful feedback happens on a very slow timeframe. It’s easy to get distracted in the immediacy of people tweeting replies in realtime, but the reason I write is for those rare times, years later, when I get an email from someone I might only barely know, saying that something I wrote meant something to them.

→ And that’s it for this week. If your insatiable appetite for beer-related reading hasn’t been sated, Stan Hieronymus posts his selections every Monday.

We’re off on our holidays this afternoon but have a few posts scheduled to pop up during next week. Though we’re determined not to do any work, we’ll probably have a beer or two and visit the odd pub, so expect Tweets and Facebook updates.

In the meantime, here’s our usual round-up of interesting things to read around the beerier corners of the the internet.

→ Saved to Pocket this week: recollections of the 1940s from a former employee of Adnams, on their rather superior corporate blog.

→ Also saved to read later, an account of a visit to the Baird’s Malt plant in Witham Essex from It Comes in Pints.

→ The Cask Report 2014 has landed and here’s the author’s handy digest.  Pete Brown’s findings echoes one of the underlying arguments of Brew Britannia: ‘Cask ale and craft beer are not the same thing, but neither are they entirely separate — there is a pretty big overlap.’

→ Richard Taylor at the Beercast continues to prod at Brewmeister as the Advertising Standards Agency censures the Scottish brewer over marketing for Snake Venom. There’s good stuff in comments, too, including more measured responses than we’ve previously seen from Brewmeister’s Lewis Shand.

→ Sabina Llewellyn-Davies’s article on Lebanese craft beer for All About Beer is worth a read: ‘Lebanon does not boast a huge beer drinking community; the total yearly consumption of beer is about equal to the amount of beer consumed during the month long Oktoberfest in Munich.’

→ The Gentle Author at Spitalfields Life has put together a list of the language of beer, including some phrases new to us — a noggin of Merry-Goe-Down, anyone?

→ We shared this on Twitter but it’s too good not to flag here as well: ‘Rick Wakeman Consumer Guide to the Beers of the World’, by Chris Salewicz, from 1974 (enlargeable scan of a page from the NME about halfway down).

→ There’s a lot of information about beer and British culture packed into this one family photo.

My dad (far left) and his mates being introduced to beer and tabs. 1959. pic.twitter.com/Ifqzq8rirH

— Graham Nelson (@arrowsails) September 25, 2014

→ And this is nice, isn’t it?

Stayed in today, with a pint and my paint set… pic.twitter.com/9JTFnZ8xWf

— ???????????????? ???????????????????? (@lookatbrew) February 14, 2014

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!