Categories
beer in fiction / tv

Beer and Doctor Who Matching

Beer Opener
Dalek bottle opener. Source: James Bowe, via Flickr Creative Commons.

If our Twitter timeline and blog roll are anything to go by, a Venn diagram of Whovians and beer geeks would feature two very nearly overlaid circles.

Though we are not serious Doctor Who obsessives, we are certainly excited about next weekend’s fiftieth anniversary episode, and so here are a few suggestions for beers to drink while watching The Day of the Doctor.

1. The essence of 1963

The year the Doctor first appeared on TV screens was also a big year for British beer:

Doctor Who, though, was born amid the popular post-Sputnik obsession with space travel and ‘the white heat of technology‘, and, so perhaps ‘space age keg’ is the way to go?

Five litre mini-kegs from British breweries are generally good value and should help your Who-watching party go with a doo-weeeee-ooooooooooh!

2. Time travel

Fuller's Past Masters 1966 Strong Ale.There is an increasing range on the market of beers brewed to historic recipes, giving your taste buds the chance to experience, for example, 1880, 1938 or 1966. (‘The Doctor? Some call him… the Past Master.’)

Drinking beer from the future is somewhat more difficult, though. You could experience the near future with a kvass (‘You Maniacs! You brewed it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!’) or, in traditional sci-fi fashion, put blue food colouring in normal beer and drink it from Tupperware.

3. Regeneration

Perhaps this is just the special occasion to unearth your collection of your favourite brewery’s vintage ales and do ‘a vertical’? If you’ve got a Tom Baker-era Adnams’ Tally Ho to compare to a mere David Tennant, then all the better.

4. Something bigger on the inside

Following on from an interesting discussion here about the apparent ‘bigness’ of beer, and thinking again of the TARDIS, what about drinking something which is a small beer on paper and yet somehow houses near-infinite amounts of flavour? Something like Magic Rock Circus of Sour (3.5%) might be a candidate, or maybe this silly beer from Brewdog? (We’ve never tasted it.)

5. Specific beers for each doctor

There are (probably) three actors playing The Doctor in next week’s episode, but you might want to warm up before the episode with something that brings to mind Paul McGann (would one of these do the job?).

There is an obvious choice from to represent David Tennant — a certain lager from his native Scotland, with a name which is almost perfect.

Matt Smith… well, he’s a right hipster, isn’t he? So perhaps one of trendy brewery Kernel’s historic beers which look young but are actually very, very old?

John Hurt is still a mystery, but something war-like and well-respected. And from Derbyshire. Thornbridge Jaipur!

(And it might be a good idea to keep a bottle of Marble Manchester Bitter on hand in case Christopher Eccleston does show up after all…)

Categories
beer in fiction / tv

Beer on TV: an Anti-Wishlist

Old TV
Old TV by Steve Stein on Flickr, under Creative Commons.

Every now and then the question surfaces: why isn’t there a programme about beer on TV? We haven’t hit on a winning format yet, but we do know what we wouldn’t want to watch.

1. The Great British Brew Off: A very slow-paced race against time hosted by Oz Clarke, with someone like Alastair Hook as the bad-tempered expert judge. Most weeks, Hook makes someone cry by telling them that their IPA ‘hardly has any notes of mango at all’. Music: something by Daniel Pemberton with the sound of clinking glasses for percussion.

2. Top Beer: three obnoxious blokes with longish hair sit around making laddish jokes. They go to Oktoberfest and leer at waitresses. They take baths in beer, snort it, inject it, take it in suppository form, and fire it out of cannons. They attempt to operate heavy machinery while under the influence of alcohol and get loads of complaints. Music: Status Quo.

3. The Twinkly Beer Chef: from the spotless, charmingly decorated kitchen of her West London flat, the twinkly beer chef prepares twee dishes to go with specific beers, before meeting actors pretending to be her friends on the beach at Brighton for an ‘impromptu’ (awkward) beer-and-food tasting party. Music: xylophone, celeste, breathy cover versions of Joy Division.

4. Big Baz’s Beer Road Trip: a red-faced man who looks as if he needs urgent medical attention drives around in a vintage Jaguar touring breweries, occasionally slurping beer very close to the camera before shouting: ‘Oh, that is AWESOME!’ He never lets anyone else get a word in edgeways. Music: synthesised heavy rock from the De Wolf music library.

5. The Twinkly Meadow Dream Brewery: the Twinklys have given up their humdrum jobs in the City (she was a journalist, he worked at an ad agency) to chase their dream and open a brewery in the rural West Country. Every week, they face a rather contrived challenge, knowing that they’ve invited the local womens’ institute round to taste their new stout to thank for them knitting a new fermenting vessel. Music: acoustic guitars and fiddles.

6. The Very Dry History of Beer: an academic with a slightly unnerving habit of looking off to one side of the camera, a lisp, and a peculiar gait tells the story of beer with just enough detail to bore most people to death, but far too superficially to satisfy anyone who has read a couple of books. At one point, things are livened up by an interview with an even more uncomfortable looking academic during which they keep talking over one another. Music: Philip Glass, Façades.

Categories
bottled beer opinion

Just a Marketing Term

Coronet Pale Ale advertisement, 1950s.

It starts as ‘just a marketing term’, probably describing something that has been around for decades.

Supermarket buyers like the ‘marketing term’, so it becomes a ‘category’.

The ‘category’ begets aisles and articles and awards.

Existing businesses develop ‘strategies’ to get a slice of the ‘category’.

New businesses emerge specialising in it.

Eventually, the ‘category’ is worth £X millions per year and employs X thousand people.

Just a marketing term?

(We’ve been writing about the emergence of ‘premium bottled ales’ in the nineteen-nineties, and reflecting on the comments here.)

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture

Beer: You Can’t Handle the Truth!

Psst! Whispering men.

Psst! Psst! Yeah, you. Who do you think owns the brewery that makes that beer you’re drinking, that ‘Dan Spinnaker’s Fat Legs IPA’? Ha! That’s what they want you to think.

There is no ‘Dan Spinnaker’. Designed by focus group, he was. The bloke you see at press conferences is an actor. Been in Casualty, under a different name of course. The beer’s brewed under contract, by Global Beverages Incorporated, at a state-of-the-art plant in Poland. It gets shipped over in tankers and then bottled on Shadrack & Duxbury’s line in Warley. They sneak it back into the so-called Spinnaker’s ‘brewery’ in midnight convoys. Not very ‘craft’ that, is it? Eh? Eh? Follow the money, sunshine — follow the money. It’ll lead you to a shadowy group of Russian investors — FACT!

As for Shadrack & Duxbury… don’t get me started. Old Bob Duxbury was nice as pie when you met him but it was known in the trade that he was a member of a pagan cult. Used to kill goats with his bare hands. Most of the profits from the brewery still go to the Esoteric Order of Dagon. What did I say? That’s right, follow the money.

These days, of course, Shadrack’s Champion Best is supposedly top-notch cask-conditioned ale, but here’s what I heard: it’s high-gravity brewed using turnip starch and hop extract, and then they filter it before putting back just enough yeast to satisfy CAMRA’s technical committee. Total con.

As for CAMRA… I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you, know what I mean?

Categories
Beer history

Golden Pint ’76 Awards

Golden Pints 76

Yesterday, we offered our two penn’orth on 2012, but that got us thinking about how, with inflation in mind, the Golden Pint Awards might have looked several decades ago, just as the real ale craze was kicking off. With thanks to Barm aka @robsterowski for unearthing the original logo, here are some extracts from Boak and Bailey’s Beer Newsletter, December 1976, scanned from the tattered copy kept in a shoebox in the attic.

Scan of text from the December 1976 Boak and Bailey beer newsletter.