Tag: round up

We’re off up country to investigate a couple of interesting-sounding pubs but, as always, we’ve found time to put together a few links to accompany your coffee and bacon.

→ Julian Healey, the founder of Australia-based website Hopslist.com, emailed us a few weeks ago. Having now had a chance to look at this comprehensive catalogue of hop varieties and their characteristics, we’ve bookmarked it, because it’s good. (What’s in it for him? Advertising revenue, as far as we can tell — nothing sinister.)

→ The Guardian‘s Tony Naylor is back on beer with two articles in the last week: one listing central London’s best craft beer pubs, and another on the rise of the ‘craft’ bottle shop.

→ Will Hawkes writes about smoked beers for the Independent.

→ This by the Beer Nut got us thinking:

Wrasslers XXXX [is] a beer I’m coming increasingly to believe would be badged as a black IPA if it were brewed today for the first time.

→ It seems that, at long last, brewers might be realising that the marketing edge of using clear and green glass is outweighed by the potential for damage to the beer and to their reputations. Marston’s have made a commitment to using brown (‘amber’) glass and are, in fact, now being a bit sneery about clear bottles; while Pilsner Urquell are bringing back brown bottles in the UK from next year.

→ The nearest we’ve found to a ‘long read’ this week is this 1000-word piece by Daniel Riley for GQ which is about compulsively ‘ticking’ hipster restaurants, but might make uncomfortable reading for craft beer fans:

This attentiveness to these lists—the fact that I keep a list of lists—is proof of something. That I know about food? Nope. That I’m a little bit compulsive? Probably. That I have bought into a system in which part of my value—the part that says whether I’m worth my salt in small talk—can be measured by the restaurants where I’ve stuffed my face?

→ And, finally, you can now read samples of Brew Britannia using Amazon’s ‘Look Inside’ feature. This is rather a nerve-wracking moment for us. We hope you like it, especially if you’ve been holding off ordering a copy until you could handle the goods.

Here are a few things we’ve spotted around the blogoshire and beyond for you to enjoy with your hangover.

→ There’s a real sense of place evoked through small details in this piece on a Sam Smith’s pub in Cardiff from Craig Heap, and it made us want to drink their beer.

→ Is it time for breweries to indicate a recommend retail price for their beer?

It frustrates me a lot that a beer that leaves here at £2.60 a (750ml) bottle is in a bar about 20 miles away being sold at £15 #greedy

— The Wild Beer Co (@WildBeerCo) April 17, 2014

→ Old wooden brewery crates are practical and attractive, but they go at a premium on Ebay, but Bob Arnott has a solution.

→ Saved to Pocket this week: a piece on the new Oregon Hops & Brewing archive at Oregon State University. (Via @brewingarchives)

→ We wrote a not entirely serious piece explaining why you should order a copy of Brew Britannia. (If you don’t like Amazon or Waterstones, you could ask your local independent bookshop to get a copy on order.)

→ We’re fascinated by the question of whether ‘golden ale’ is really a 1980s invention so this example of a notably pale beer with the brand name Golden Ale from the 1930s has us intrigued.

→ Here’s a piece we were asked to write for the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog section, on big brewery mergers. (Annoyingly, we got the brewery number statistic wrong – we’ve asked for it to be corrected.)

Before we head off to conduct earnest research into Cornish beer for our now annual ‘best beers‘ blog post, some bits and pieces of interest.

→ If you don’t follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you might have missed that, yesterday, instead of a blog post, we added a new page: “So you’re thinking about getting seriously into beer?”

→ News just in: the esteemed judges of the World Beer Cup (PDF link) agree with us about Magic Rock Salty Kiss. (Albeit in the weirdly specific category of fruit wheat beers.)

→ Here’s Phil Mellows on Marston’s programme of pub building. (In Somerset last weekend, we saw that they built a brand new plastick Olde Worlde country inn two doors down from an actually old country inn. Hmmmm.)

→ This from Adnams is a great example of how to respond to frequently asked questions from customers: what exactly is the difference between cask and bottled Broadside?

→ Saved to Pocket this week:

• Conservation Magazine on some US breweries’ environmental policies
• Collectors Weekly on a bloke who collects beer memorabilia with a baseball connection.
• The story of an eccentric pub landlord — no, seriously eccentric. (Via @kevinharris.)

→ And, finally, we agree with Richard:

A fearful sentence for beer-festival attendees "There will be other strolling and surprise entertainers sprinkled throughout the day"

— Richard Taylor (@TheBeerCast) April 8, 2014