tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-307434802024-03-13T19:03:06.212+00:00Pete BrownTreating beer with the respect and irreverence it deserves since 2003.
British Guild of Beer Writers Beer Writer of the Year 2009 and 2012.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.comBlogger621125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-86487047407321802612017-08-03T17:24:00.000+01:002017-08-03T19:36:31.696+01:00A Quick Blog Post For IPA Day<b><i><span style="font-size: large;">If you really want to know why IPA was supposedly so strong and hoppy, look not to the breweries, but to India...</span></i></b><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Today is apparently International Let's Argue About The Mythology Of IPA Day.</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">One of the main points of contention about this much-mythologised style is whether or not it really was strong and hoppy, and if it was, why it was. </span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Wherever I've seen this point argued, it's been exclusively to do with the nature of the beer itself: did it have to be strong and/or hoppy to survive the journey? What do the brewing records say?</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Some eminent brewing historians have found evidence of low strength, relatively low-hopped IPAs making the journey, which is fascinating. But some commentators have then taken this as evidence that disproves the 'myth' that IPA was strong and hoppy. </span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">But the logic of that is flawed: evidence of weaker, less hoppy proves that IPA <u>did not have to be</u> strong and hoppy. It does not <u>disprove</u> that strong, hoppy beers went to India. </span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In my research for my book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0330511866/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501778966&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=hops+glory&dpPl=1&dpID=513MczBdRGL&ref=plSrch" target="_blank">Hops & Glory</a></i>, I found requisition orders from the India Office from the 1870s which specified the gravity, hopping rate, size of barrel, even the width of the bung on the barrel, for both India Pale Ale and Porter. When we translated the specs into modern brewing, we had a beer that was around 8% ABV and had an insane amount of hops. When we recreated it with Everards Brewery, the volume of hops clogged up the kettle and the beer was green when it came out. It was so hoppy we had to new the same beer again without any hops, and blend to two to get a beer that was still damn hoppy. But what's important to remember is that the alpha acid content - the potency of hops - is far higher now, far more concentrated, than it was then. You'd have had to had far greater physical quantities of hops in 1870 to get the bitterness from hops you get today. </span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Anyway, these requisitions prove that at least some IPA that went to India <u>was</u> very hoppy and very strong. But its presence against other less hoppy, weaker beers, proves that it did not have to be like this in order to survive the journey. </span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">What does this tell us? Well, there's only so much that looking at the production end of things can tell us. For further clues, we have to look at the consumption side. What did people in India want their beer to be like? Throughout the whole of brewing history, this is a question that is asked all too seldom.</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Another contentious 'myth' is that IPA was brewed for the troops. For some reason, there's a school of thought that it wasn't. Certainly, it wasn't the only think they drank. And yes, the civilians in India drank it too. But the big orders I saw for requisition were specifically for the he numbers of troops that were sent to India after the 1857 first war of Indian Independence (referred to by colonialists as the Indian Mutiny.)</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Being a soldier in India was a life of short periods of extreme violence separated by long stretches of total boredom. The soldiers filled that boredom by drinking. </span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">When Fanny Parkes went India on a ship full of soldiers in 1827, she came to know many of her fellow passengers and was shocked at how quickly many of them died. The average life expectancy of a soldier serving in Calcutta was just three months. Disease was a far bigger killer than combat, and much of it was caused by alcohol. </span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Beer couldn't be brewed well in India, but a drink known as arak could be made simply by drawing off palm sap and letting it ferment in the hot sun. Arak drinking contests claimed the first European casualties in India when the Dutch and English spice traders got there. One binge could be fatal. </span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">So, in order to keep soldiers alive, they had to be given alcohol that was strong and flavourful, like arak, but not fatal. IPA was strong because if it wasn't, the boozy soldiers would have drunk arak instead. </span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">As for hoppiness? The vivid hop characters we love today would have vanished from the beer after months on a hot ship. But the flavours changed. The locals used to say IPA 'ripened', and when it was ripe, they described it character as being like champagne. My sea-matured IPA certainly had that character to it - somewhere between what we think of as IPA and barley wine. </span><br>
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<span style="font-size: large;">So - at least some IPA was strong and hoppy. It didn't have to be. It was like that because that's how people wanted it to be, so they drank it instead of the local gut rot. </span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-69354159237550285812017-05-30T12:15:00.000+01:002017-06-07T15:12:12.936+01:00Book events this summer - and Stoke Newington LitFest this weekend!!<i><b>I'm doing lots of events this summer - starting closer to home, then going further away. Some of them must be near you, surely...</b></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">For the eighth year, my wife Liz has organised the <a href="http://www.stokenewingtonliteraryfestival.com/" target="_blank">Stoke Newington Literary Festival</a>, which happens this weekend, 2nd to 4th June. This year there's a great line-up focusing on politics (there's a lot of it about at the moment), comedy, music and food and drink, with lots more stuff about every subject you can think of, including a children's programme featuring a Harry Potter birthday party and the chance to meet the actual Cat in the Hat, so there's where I'll be.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">At least, that's where I'll be when I'm not doing my own events.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">On Saturday afternoon at 4pm I'm chatting pubs with Kit Caless, author of the superb Spoon's Carpets, which is far more than the novelty gift book it might initially appear to be. It's a really great take on this love-em-or-hate-em institution.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We'll be chatting all things pubs, including the Wetherspoons Paradox, and signing our books afterwards.</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Then at 6pm I'll be kicking off an evening of beery fun at my It's The Drink Talking Litfest event. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This is a loosely formatted beery chat show sometimes, and changes depending on what's happening and who's around. This year, the show is in two parts. In the first half, I'll be talking to Henry Jeffries about his book Empire of Booze, which is about how Britain invented all the best alcoholic drinks, including the French ones. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Then, after the interval, I'll be presenting my new book, Miracle Brew, which is published on 1st June. I'll be talking hops, barley, yeast and water, with samples of beer and ingredients to savour. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I'm writing this on my way to make my Hay Festival debut with Miracle Brew tonight. If you're in town, I'm also doing a signing at the fantastic Beer Revolution shop at 4pm. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Then I'm doing events around the UK, in Holland, South Africa, with some to be announced in the United States! Please do come along. All confirmed events so far detailed below.</span><br />
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<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">30th May - </span><a class="" href="https://www.hayfestival.com/p-12292-pete-brown.aspx" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Hay Festival</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> - Miracle Brew, 7pm</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">31st May - </span><a class="" href="https://www.hayfestival.com/p-12326-pete-brown-talks-to-andy-fryers.aspx" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Hay Festival</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> - The Apple Orchard 11.30am</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">4th June - Stoke Newington Literary Festival - </span><a class="" href="http://www.stokenewingtonliteraryfestival.com/snlf_events/pubs-from-cask-to-carpet/" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Pub from Cask to Carpet</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">, with Kit Caless, author of ‘Spoon’s Carpets’, 4pm</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">4th June - Stoke Newington Literary Festival - </span><a class="" href="http://www.stokenewingtonliteraryfestival.com/snlf_events/pete-browns-big-beer-event/" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It’s the Drink Talking</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">: Miracle Brew, plus special guest Henry Jeffries talking about his book Empire of Booze, 6pm</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">12th June - </span><a class="" href="http://spiritland.com/radio/how-do-you-write-about-food-an-unbound-night-out/?utm_source=Unbound+Newsletter&utm_campaign=211ad53282-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_05_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8892b9533f-211ad53282-306104393&ct=t(Spiritland_Food_London_5_23_2017)&goal=0_8892b9533f-211ad53282-306104393&mc_cid=211ad53282&mc_eid=a3f2dac44c" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Spiritland</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">, Kings Cross, London - 'How Do You Write About Food?’ Panel Discussion and Miracle Brew signing</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">23rd-25th June - </span><a class="" href="http://www.wildegist.nl/breweries/" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Carnivale Brettanomyces</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> - Amsterdam - Miracle Brew</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">26th June - </span><a class="" href="https://programme.cvhf.org.uk/?date=2017-06-26" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Chalke Valley History Festival</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> - The Apple Orchard</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">29th June - <a href="http://www.city-books.co.uk/pete-brown-beer-tasting-and-talk/" target="_blank">City Books, Brighton</a> - Miracle Brew</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">6th to 19th July - </span><a class="" href="http://beerbootcamp.weebly.com/" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Beer Boot Camp</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">, South Africa, Miracle Brew signing event</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">21st to 23rd July - </span><a class="" href="http://curiousartsfestival.com/" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Curious Arts Festival </a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">- The Apple Orchard</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">17th to 21st August - </span><a class="" href="http://www.greenman.net/" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Green Man Festival</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> - Beer and Music matching </span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">31st August - 4th September - </span><a class="" href="http://endoftheroadfestival.com/" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">End of the Road Festival</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> - Miracle Brew</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">7th to 10th Sept - </span><a class="" href="http://www.greenman.net/" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Festival No 6</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> - Miracle Brew</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">16th-17th Sept - </span><a class="" href="http://curiousartsfestival.com/" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Abergavenny Food Festival</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">29th October - </span><a class="" href="http://offtheshelf.org.uk/" style="color: purple; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Off The Shelf</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">, Sheffield - Miracle Brew</span></span></li>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-46832893529439211492017-05-24T16:45:00.002+01:002017-05-24T16:45:35.492+01:00'Miracle Brew' is coming - at last!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">My first book about beer since 2009 hits UK shelves next week - and North America later this year.</span></b></i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiELjKGH-xwZOpZ9DhBWuhSnnrBknjjgIxnHbwN5KGSJZYs8eDF1yI5FsZq7gpcE_M4FlSZORAZA7Xb6RRRXDL7SEPekHEl12M1BEKYE4f5mUdfBbYr173pqwWTjN27iH53aEgrTw/s1600/Miracle+Brew+cover+art.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="995" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiELjKGH-xwZOpZ9DhBWuhSnnrBknjjgIxnHbwN5KGSJZYs8eDF1yI5FsZq7gpcE_M4FlSZORAZA7Xb6RRRXDL7SEPekHEl12M1BEKYE4f5mUdfBbYr173pqwWTjN27iH53aEgrTw/s640/Miracle+Brew+cover+art.jpg" width="398" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">It's been a long wait - nearly two and a half years - for those who pledged when I first announced that I was publishing my new beer book through crowd-funding publisher Unbound. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Ironically, from announcing the book and opening pledges to the date of publication, its taken about a year less than any of my first three beers books took to research and write. Books like these take you down a long and lonely road. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">There was a degree of consternation over the decision to crowdfund a book. Did it mean I couldn't get published in a traditional way? (No.) What do investors get? (A book, for the price of a book, with your name listed in the back.) Was it vanity publishing? (No - in many ways, it's the opposite.) But quite quickly, enough people pledged - around 530 - so that Unbound could give it the green light. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Those who did pledge should be receiving their copies this week. (If that's you, please tweet or post when you get it!) The book is also available to <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Miracle-Brew-Barley-Water-Nature/dp/1783523352/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" target="_blank">pre-order on Amazon</a>, and because Unbound have a distribution deal with Penguin Random House, it'll be in bookshops just like any other book from Thursday 1st June.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I did have a few readers in North America complain about the shipping cost when they tried to pledge for the book - for some, it was more than the book itself. The good news there is that <a href="http://www.chelseagreen.com/" target="_blank">Chelsea Green</a>, a publisher that has produced some of my favourite food and drink books, has just bought the North American rights to <i>Miracle Brew</i> and they'll be publishing a slightly tweaked</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">*</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"> edition in the autumn - sorry, fall - probably early October, and it looks like I'll be doing an American publicity tour to support it! Maybe see you at the Great American Beer Festival.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I'm enormously proud of this book. In terms of tone and content, it picks up on elements of <a href="http://petebrown.blogspot.co.uk/p/man-walks-into-pub.html" target="_blank">Man Walks into a Pub</a>, <a href="http://petebrown.blogspot.co.uk/p/three-sheets.html" target="_blank">Three Sheets to the Wind</a> and <a href="http://petebrown.blogspot.co.uk/p/hops-and-glory.html" target="_blank">Hops & Glory</a>, but also reflects the fact that I'm a decade older than when I wrote those books. The first was a history book about beer, the second a travel book about beer, and the third combined the two with a bit extra. Judged by the same standard, this is a science and nature book about beer, with a lot of travel and history, and plenty of extra, all thrown in. At 400 pages long it's a chunky bastard - just like its author these days...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I daresay I'll be writing more here about it soon. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">* Because references to a cheeky Nando's with the Archbishop of Banterbury still aren't travelling that well. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Miracle Brew is published in the UK by <a href="https://unbound.com/" target="_blank">Unbound</a> on 1st June, hardback, RRP £16.99</span></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-37972067298522750922017-04-23T09:08:00.000+01:002017-04-23T09:08:15.217+01:00Long Read: The Story of the Forgotten Genius who Discovered the Apple's Birthplace, Before Being Murdered by Stalin<b><span style="font-size: large;"><i>When I wrote </i>The Apple Orchard<i>, there were edits. I wanted to give the origin story of the apple, but this was cut from the final book because by the time I'd finished it, </i>The Apple Orchard<i> was the story of my own personal journey of discovery through the English apple year, and this just stuck out in the narrative as something that didn't belong. It was an important chapter in a book about apples, just not the book about apples that mine had become. I've been saving it for a while but as we're at the start of blossom time, one of the most wonderful times in the apple year, I thought I'd celebrate by publishing this story here as a long read. </i>The Apple Orchard<i> has just been released in paperback and should be available now in all good bookshops, as well as <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-Orchard-Story-English-Fruit/dp/0141982284/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=1043Z49HQNF5E90RG1PM" target="_blank">here</a> if you don't know any good bookshops. I'm going to be talking about the magic and mythology of the apple at Herefordshire's <a href="http://www.bigapple.org.uk/blossomtime-2015/" target="_blank">Big Apple Blossomtime celebrations</a> on Monday 1st May. </i></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-large;">The Heavenly
Mountains</span></h1>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Let’s play a quick game of word
association. I’ll say a word, and I want you to say the first word that comes
into your head in response.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Okay, here goes: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kazakhstan</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Did you think<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Borat</i>? If you’re reading this in the second decade of the
twenty-first century, I bet you did. Sacha Baron-Cohen’s fictitious Kazakh
journalist is world-famous. Now let’s try it again, but you need to come up
with a different word. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Kazakhstan.
<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Anything? Anything at all? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Weird isn’t it? Kazakhstan is the
world’s ninth-biggest country, at 2.7 million square kilometres, it’s
fractionally smaller than Argentina, almost as big as India, and nearly twice
as big as the entire European Union. Yet all we know about it is a made-up
comedy character. At the start of his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In
Search of Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared</i>, Christopher Robbins
challenges a fan of Borat, arguing that no one would dare portray such a
negative racial stereotype of Jews, African-Americans or the Welsh. “Well of
course not,” replied the puzzled fan, “That’s why he <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">invented</i> a country!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Robbins goes on to illustrate how
Kazakhstan suffers from our ignorance about ‘The ‘Stans,’ that mysterious and
chaotic collection of states below Russia:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Was that
the country where the president boiled his enemies alive? No, that was the
reputation of the Uzbek president south of the border. Was it the place where
the president had golden statues made of himself and placed on revolving
platforms to lead the sun? No again, that was next door in Turkmenistan. It was
an anarchic, narco-state wasn’t it, embroiled in a permanent civil war? No,
that was the fate of poor, blighted Tajikistan.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In fairness, our ignorance is
hardly surprising. The Russian Tsars closed the country to outsiders during their
expansion eastwards, and then it was swallowed by the Soviet Union. It was an
incredible trick: the ninth largest country in the world simply disappeared.
And it’s re-emergence since the collapse of the USSR has had a profound impact
on our understanding of the apple. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The first westerner to discover the
great apple forests of Kazakhstan was Carl Friedrich von Ledebour, a
German-Estonian botanist and professor of science at Tartu University in
Estonia, who also founded its school of botany. The nineteenth century was a
time of scientific classification, of epic, years-long journeys to discover and
catalogue as many different species of everything as we could. Darwin’s
journeys aboard the Beagle may be the most famous of these voyages, because the
diversity he saw inspired his theory of natural selection, but he was only one
of many undertaking similar expeditions. Von Ledebour took a particular
interest in the flora of the Russian Empire, and became the first person to
catalogue it comprehensively. Within this study, he identified for the first
time a species he called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pyrus sieversii</i>,
better known to us know as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Malus
Sieversii</i>, the wild apple of Central Asia. He discovered these apples in
the Tien Shan, or Heavenly Mountains, tucked in the south-western corner of
Kazakhstan.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In 1854 the Russians built a fort
called Verniy (‘loyal’ in Russian) in the foothills of the Tien Shan Mountains,
to protect this far-flung corner of their empire. The fort grew, taking in
Russian peasants and Kazakh nomads who had been driven from their traditional
lands, and by the early 20<sup>th</sup> century it was a thriving city. In 1921
the residents voted to change the name of their city to Alma-Ata, which means
‘Father of Apples’, and in 1929 the city became the capital of Kazakhstan. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">That same year, Alma-Ata received a
distinguished visitor. Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was a botanist,
geneticist, agronomist and geographer, a brilliant scientist, hailed by some
who knew him as a genius. Having grown up in a poor rural village that was perpetually
hit by crop failures and food rationing, he was obsessed by food security and
the prevention of famine both at home in Russia and around the world. He
believed that the best way to understand plants and the potential for their
cultivation was to establish their original source in the world, and developed
an over-simplistic but not entirely inaccurate theory that the likely origin of
a species of plant was the place where today it shows the greatest genetic
diversity. Effectively, such places were nature’s laboratories, where different
permutations were worked through until the best ones were developed. Vavilov
travelled the world collecting thousands of seeds, and established the world’s
largest seed bank in Leningrad. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In 1929 he was travelling by mule
train across Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, attempting to reach western China via a
mountain pass. ‘The path turned out to be more difficult than we expected, and,
in fact, we lost two of the horses,’ he wrote later. ‘But somehow we reached
the northern slopes of the range where we found a road leading directly to
Alma-Ata.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">What he found there astounded him.
In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Five Continents</i>, the book that set
out his theory of plant origins, he wrote:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Thickets of
wild apples stretch out through an extensive area around the city and along the
slopes of the mountains, here and there forming a real forest. In contrast to
the small, wild apples of the Caucasus, the wild apples of Kazakhstan are
represented mainly by large-fruited varieties, not differing much from cultivated
species. It was the first of September and the time when the apple ripen. We
could see with our own eyes that here we were in a remarkable centre of origin
of apples, where cultivated forms did not rank noticeably above wild ones and
where it was difficult to distinguish wild apples from those cultivated. Some
of the forms in this forest were so good in respect to quality and dimensions
that they could be directly grown in a garden…<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The slopes of the Tien Shan were,
he believed, a ‘living laboratory where one can see the evolutionary process
unfolding before one’s eyes.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Five
Continents</i> was the most important book on plant origins ever published up
to that point. It had the potential to radically improve our understanding and
cultivation of important pants. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the world
forgot all about Vavilov and his sensational discoveries, just as it forgot
about Kazakhstan. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Vavilov’s problem was that he
believed science should be kept separate from politics. That may sound perfectly
reasonable, but Joseph Stalin, who came to power in 1924, disagreed. Around the
same time, Vavilov befriended an ambitious young scientist called Trofim
Lysenko. Eleven years younger than Vavilov, Lysenko was a peasant by background
who had gained his degree from a correspondence course. When he met Isai
Prezent, a political ideologue, their fusion of politics and science began to
find favour within the Soviet hierarchy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">By this point, the science of plant
genetics was well understood. Gregor Mendel’s work in the mid- to late
nineteenth century had established the basic principle of genetic inheritance.
Controversial at the time, it was rediscovered and elaborated upon in the 1900s
by a number of scientists, including British biologist William Bateson, with
whom Vavilov had spent time studying plant immunity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Bateson was the first person to use
the term ‘genetics’ to describe the study of heredity, and was the main
champion of Mendel’s ideas once they had been rediscovered. So it came as a
shock when Lysenko, who Vavilov had once regarded as his protégé, rejected the
entire basis of Mendelian genetics. Lysenko falsely claimed to have invented
the process of ‘vernalisation’, where wheat varieties normally sown in winter
could be made to behave like those sown in spring. In reality the procedure had
been familiar to farmers since the early 1800s, but Lysenko made grossly
exaggerated claims about its efficiency. He also claimed that by changing the
conditions a plant was experiencing, you didn’t just change its behaviour; you
were creating a new species of plant, one which would pass on its new
characteristics to its offspring. In this way, grain that could only grow in
warm climates could be made to grow in cold climates too, and the Soviet food
supply could be guaranteed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">All this was rubbish of course. It
was little more than a rehash of Lamarckism, the idea that an organism can pass
on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring, which
had been destroyed by Darwinism. But in Soviet Russia, it was heralded as a new
‘Soviet genetics’, and Lysenko became the most influential scientists in the
USSR. Until the 1930s Russia had been a world leader in the advancement of
genetics. Now Lysenko dismissed mainstream genetics as ‘harmful nonsense.’
Stalin began working on a five-year plan to enforce the collectivisation of all
farms, applying Lysenko’s principles. Lysenko began praising his master in
speeches as ‘The Great Gardener.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Vavilov shook his head in
disbelief, asking, “Is this some kind of religion?” If religion and science are
related in the ways they seek to understand and explain the world, this was a
cult masked as science. With no scientific proof, it was all about faith. It
appealed to Stalin’s sense that the Soviet machine could improve everything,
even breeding undesirable traits out of people. By 1940 Lysenko had
successfully eradicated any mention of the great 19<sup>th</sup> century
geneticists from school textbooks. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">When the collectivisation
experiment inevitably failed, cognitive dissonance ruled the day. The problem
couldn’t possibly be Comrade Lysenko’s crackpot theories – someone must have
sabotaged the great experiment. Between 1934 and 1940, eighteen of Vavilov’s
colleagues were arrested, and almost every serious agricultural publishing
outlet was closed. Vavilov’s remaining colleagues, worried for their safety,
began to disown him. His research was cut and he was barred from travelling. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Finally, in 1940 Vavilov himself
was arrested and charged with being an anti-Soviet spy who had sabotaged crop
production. After days of 13-hour interrogations, he cracked and confessed to
trumped-up charges of wasting state funds, deliberately creating a shortage of
seeds and disrupting the rotation of crops. He was even accused of ‘damaging
the landing grounds in the Leningrad military region by sowing the airport with
weeds.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Vavilov was sentenced to death,
which was later commuted to twenty years imprisonment. He died in a hard labour
camp in 1943. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">By that time Leningrad had been
under siege for two years by the Nazis. Stalin had rescued the art from the
Hermitage ‘for the future enjoyment of all people,’ but he ignored Vavilov’s
seed collection at the Institute of Applied Botany and New Crops. Vavilov’s
remaining colleagues preserved large parts of the seed collection by hiding it
in the cellars, keeping it intact, refusing to eat the seeds even though nine
of them starved to death by the time the siege was lifted in 1944. Their
incredible bravery was for nothing: after the war the collection fell into
Lysenko’s hands, who allowed it to be ruined by the cross-breeding and
outbreeding of different strains. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Through the middle of the twentieth
century, advances in our understanding of plant genetics allowed food
production to soar around the world. When followers of Thomas Malthus predicted
that a rising population would result in global starvation by the 1970s, this
didn’t happen because the yields from fields and orchards rose faster than the
population did. In the USSR, until Lysenko’s demise in 1954, agriculture went
backwards. By the time of his death the Soviet Union was fifty years behind the
rest of the world in agricultural practice – surely a factor in its eventual
demise. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In 1929, when Nikolai Vavilov made
it into Alma-Ata after losing two of his horses, the residents tried to help
him by supplying more. As it happened, Vavilov declined their offer because a
colleague was on the way with motorised transport. But for Aimak Dzangaliev, a
fifteen year-old boy charged with looking after Vavilov’s fresh horses, the brief
encounter with Vavilov would change his life – and perhaps the future of the
apple. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Dzangaliev was amazed that an
eminent scientist from Leningrad would come all the way to Alma-Aty to look at its
apples. Seeing them through Vavilov’s eyes inspired Dzangaliev to study them
himself. After going to study with Vavilov in Leningrad, he returned to
Alma-Aty to continue the work Vavilov had started. He spent the next sixty
years with his wife, Tatiana Salova, cataloguing and researching Kazakhstan’s
fauna. They discovered that of 6000 species, at least 157 were either direct
precursors or close wild relatives of domesticated crops. They found that 90
per cent of all cultivated fruits in the world’s temperate zones had wild
relatives or ancestors historically found in Kazakhstan’s forests, in their
eyes confirming Vavilov’s by now forgotten theory that this was the birthplace
of the apple. They catalogued more than 56 native forms of apples, 26 of which
looked like purely wild ecotypes, with another 30 being natural or
semi-domesticated hybrids. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">There was just one problem for
Dzangaliev: his beloved forests were disappearing. Since 1960 between 70 and 80
per cent of Alma-Aty’s wild forests have been lost to luxury apartments and
hotels, holiday chalets and summer cabins. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">When the Soviet Empire collapsed,
Dzangaliev, now in his eighties, contacted plant scientists in the United
States and begged them to come and help save his apples. Phillip Forsline, a
horticulturalist at the Plant Genetic Resources Unit in Geneva, New York, led a
number of expeditions in the 1990s and was amazed by what he saw. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Apples don’t grow in apple tree
forests. They grow here and there, wherever the seeds fall. That’s why an
orchard looks so stunning: it’s something you don’t see in nature, the product
of human co-dependence with nature to produce something neither can on their
own. Unless, that is, you’re in the Tien Shan mountains. Dzangaliev welcomed
Forsline with a firm handshake and an astonishing passion and energy for a man
in his eighties. (He credited his health and longevity to a constant diet of
wild apples, eating at least one every day.) He led Forsline into Tien Shan’s
apple trees forests, and showed him dense clusters of trees that were 300 years
old, fifty feet tall with trunks as wide as oaks, still producing healthy crops
of apples. The variety of those apples was astonishing: dun russet and shiny
smooth, marble-sized and melon-sized, reds, greens, pinks, purples, yellows and
gold. Some of the wild varieties had grown as big as domesticated apples in the
west. From the samples they took, Forsline and his team estimated that the
apples in the rest of the world together contained no more than 20 per cent of
the genetic diversity on show in the Kazakh forests. Somewhere in that gene
pool may lie resistance to blight, scab, or pests which can be bred into our
favourite apple varieties, or even possibilities for the apple that we haven’t
yet thought to explore. At a time when ever-fewer commercial varieties are
cultivated widely, becoming less resistant to disease thanks to their
intensively monocultural breeding, the birthplace of the apple may well contain
its future. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In the early twenty-first century,
a series of researchers used molecular genetic markers capable of
distinguishing between species to establish that what Vavilov had deduced from
observation was correct: the domesticated apples cultivated across the Western
world had so much in common genetically with the wild apples of the Tien Shan
mountains that they were without doubt descended from there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But why here? How can one spot produce
so much genetic diversity? Barrie Juniper, a plant scientist from the
University of Oxford and the first person to confirm Vavilov’s hypothesis on
the origins of the apple, has a pretty good idea. Around ten million years ago,
earthquakes and shifting tectonic plates began to create the mountain ranges of
Inner and Central Asia. At this time, an early form of the apple became trapped
on the rising land. The Tien Shan never glaciated during the Ice Ages, and was fed
by a constant supply of water from the snow pack above. Glaciers on one side
and emerging deserts on the other cut the region off from Europe and the rest
of Asia, but in this lost, fertile valley, plants and animals interacted and
cross-bred. As well as apples, the Tien Shan region is also remarkable for its
diversity and concentration of walnuts, peaches and a whole array of fruit and
nut varieties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I never got to make the journey to
Kazakhstan mysslf, but I consoled myself by reading the many accounts written
by scientists who have been. Every one of them is filled with awe and wonder at
these forests, even in their diminished state. It’s hardly surprising – in fact
probably inevitable – that when he first saw the apple forests, Phillip
Forsline declared that they had found ‘the real Garden of Eden located in the
Kazakh mountains.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-89515562615450739142017-04-12T08:36:00.000+01:002017-04-12T08:36:26.262+01:00Why I can't get too excited about BrewDog's big 'sell out'<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>The bad boys of brewing recently sold a 22% stake of their company to an investment firm. So?</b></i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">First, I have a terrible confession to make. Remember when John Lydon made those butter ads? I'm afraid I was partly responsible for that. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6m99DGLPGJA" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">It wasn't my idea or anything like that, but in my role as a planner I was responsible for putting together the research among butter buyers to find out who the best celebrity would be to front the campaign. It was one of the last freelance planning jobs I did before being able to switch to writing and beer consultancy full time. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">We tested Lydon against a bunch of other people, and he came out top among Britain's housewives because they felt he was so uncompromising, he'd never just do an ad for the money - he'd only do it if he genuinely believed what he was saying. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">In other words, he was the best person to do what we were paying him to do, because he would never do what we were paying him to do, so if he did that, it's OK. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Predictably Lydon got some stick for 'selling out'. Because this is Johnny Rotten we're talking about, he didn't give a shit. Where he deigned to give a response, he said that punk was always about grabbing the filthy lucre from the big guys, and that's exactly what he was doing here. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">(If you ever tire of arguing about the definition of craft beer, head over to music and have a go at defining punk. As I witnessed last year at an event to mark punk's 40th anniversary, it makes craft beer look simple.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">So I've witnessed a similar situation before to the one this week where BrewDog announced they were selling a chunk of the company to TSG Investment Partners in San Francisco - the same people who also help finance Vitaminwater, popchips and US beer brand Pabst - and were greeted with cries of 'sell out!'</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I can't get too excited one way or the other about this. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Firstly, it's hardly surprising, is it? BrewDog has been on an astonishing growth spurt for ten years. It already has 44 bars around the world and exports to 55 countries, and has double or even triple digit growth every year. The company has always been about rapid expansion, and this is a logical next step, which, if it has any lesson at all, is that, as Martyn Cornell has written, <a href="http://zythophile.co.uk/2017/04/09/the-real-story-behind-brewdogs-sellout-is-that-crowdfunding-will-only-get-you-so-far/" target="_blank">crowdfunding can only get you so far</a>. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Second, BrewDog is maturing. Being 'punk' makes perfect sense when you arrive and overturn all the tables in the temple of beer, but they're ten years old now, and that's ancient in craft beer years. Martin Dickie and James Watt are in their mid-thirties with young families, and they employ, at the last count, about 450 people. A couple of years ago they did a re-brand that ever so subtly made them look and feel more grown up, less brash. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5hlab0cXVo4SqKNWsRbn1qtpO77iKBx9dlS72lAqGmaQHj_7muAoIS7yAkSgMkFY7QUpcMOO-SQSISQV2JMIjz3-f3ZKJTIwL8PIOvVNeicN3gB3gNWfQq3icRfm1OlKDvcFp6w/s1600/BrewDog-labelling-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="246" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5hlab0cXVo4SqKNWsRbn1qtpO77iKBx9dlS72lAqGmaQHj_7muAoIS7yAkSgMkFY7QUpcMOO-SQSISQV2JMIjz3-f3ZKJTIwL8PIOvVNeicN3gB3gNWfQq3icRfm1OlKDvcFp6w/s400/BrewDog-labelling-1.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Before</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk_BN4LJuMMeyjKXk4KuJypguaR5hkGl3AuVXNy7fQso9HLXi2mcunTA2D3EFl3nQcQTJSU31Q7HqoRuK2ISOVYOUqh5biMaLMxTphBXVQCKeAVh3VIo2ByzGVT3G0CHMgoOhoKw/s1600/Brewdog_New_Labels-018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk_BN4LJuMMeyjKXk4KuJypguaR5hkGl3AuVXNy7fQso9HLXi2mcunTA2D3EFl3nQcQTJSU31Q7HqoRuK2ISOVYOUqh5biMaLMxTphBXVQCKeAVh3VIo2ByzGVT3G0CHMgoOhoKw/s400/Brewdog_New_Labels-018.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">After</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">BrewDog stopped being 'punk' when they grew into a stable, successful business that supports hundreds of people's livelihoods instead of putting their foot through the mash tun and throwing the fermenters into a swimming pool before overdosing on End of History in a seedy hotel room. Behind the image and the increasingly infrequent brash stunts, they employ marketers, PR people, accountants, HR managers as well as brewers who all know what they're doing, because you can't function as a large business if you don't. That doesn't sound very punk, does it?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Thirdly, James Watt individually still owns more of the company than the investment firm he's sold a chunk of his business to. If you insist on going by the US definition of craft beer, the sold stake is less than the threshold that disqualifies BrewDog from being craft. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I doubt anyone can be truly surprised by this move. I'd be amazed if anyone was genuinely upset by it. I think any outcry is merely the satisfaction of being able to say, 'I told you so.'</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://brewersfair.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/brewdog-bars-refuse-to-stock-brewdog-beers-after-brewdog-buy-out/" target="_blank">As this spoof makes clear</a>, the one significant part of this is that BrewDog will find it increasingly difficult to get away with <a href="http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/BrewDog-ditches-craft-beer-Lagunitas-after-Heineken-buy-out" target="_blank">grandstanding '4 real' behaviour</a>. I've sensed a move away from this over the last few years anyway. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The punk attitude has helped BrewDog build an amazing brand that pays a lot of people's wages and genuinely does encourage more people to enjoy great beer than would otherwise have been the case. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Punk is dead. But the punks won.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Okay, now you can tell me how the Sex Pistols were never really punk anyway.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-7259188312588941302017-03-10T14:17:00.000+00:002017-03-10T14:17:20.583+00:00Why 'craft keg' - whatever that is - is the saviour, not the enemy, of cask ale<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>The vibrancy of London's brewing scene in 2017 shows just how antiquated the argument over format has become. </b></i></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSvlDNVZiHoXQ3KNvhnluR_IML5pbDLwCKqXCeAwby2f7l8zN4wBAIXD0QLC9ThWtPM214sYHo-qJLnPhNYWnjrxlUcEhloehXmlo8IQbnccwhx1r6u1JKbjwAzlP1vjm24PU1kg/s1600/8336.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSvlDNVZiHoXQ3KNvhnluR_IML5pbDLwCKqXCeAwby2f7l8zN4wBAIXD0QLC9ThWtPM214sYHo-qJLnPhNYWnjrxlUcEhloehXmlo8IQbnccwhx1r6u1JKbjwAzlP1vjm24PU1kg/s640/8336.jpg" width="456" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">On Wednesday I opened the 33rd London Drinker festival, in a grand old hall just opposite St Pancras Station. For the first time, the festival was stocking exclusively beers brewed in London. This wouldn't have been possible until recently - ten years ago London had two or three breweries. Today it has around ninety.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">This was also the first time the festival had a keg beer stand. It was tucked quietly into a corner by the cider stall, but it was there. Festival organiser Christine Cryne told me she'd had some hate mail about the inclusion of beers that some feel are 'the enemy of cask', the 'thin end of the wedge' of some vast, corporate conspiracy, carefully woven over the last forty years, to exterminate cask ale, for reasons that have never been really made clear. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">But Christine did say she'd had about the same number of messages congratulating the organisers for having a more progressive stance. CAMRA is not some single monolith, but a sprawling mass of people with differing views. Parts of it at least are moving with the times. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">But on my way to the festival, I read something in one of CAMRA's branch magazines that reiterated the old arguments against 'craft keg' - a phrase which, in its very existence, to me shows the absurdity of those making the argument, defining and judging beer by the container it's served in rather than its style, ingredients, or the intent of the person brewing it. The whole argument feels like it should have gone away after 2010, and for most beer drinkers, it has. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">So I don't want to reignite a debate that's pointless in that neither side is likely to change their minds, but I do want to share one observation, given that this was on my mind when I was looking around the festival and trying to think what I was going to say onstage to declare it open. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I was struck not just by the number of London brewers around, but also by the nature of the beers they were offering. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I didn't even get chance to visit the keg bar: the central cask offering was utterly absorbing. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Most of the brewers didn't exist ten years ago. Those that I know personally consider themselves craft brewers, and sell their beers in cask, keg, bottles and cans. I can't speak for them, but I suspect many of them were inspired to give up their old jobs and start brewing because of the energy and momentum surrounding craft beer over the last decade. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The beers they were offering would certainly seem to bear this out. Alphabeta's Best Bitter was quenching and refreshing at 3.8% ABV and wouldn't have been out of place at any time in the festival's 33 year history. But I doubt the same brewery would have been offering a brown ale aged in old bourbon casks if it were not for the pioneering work of American and British craft brewers in barrel ageing. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Anspach and Hobday's pale ale, like many British pale and golden ales now, was brewed with American hops popularised by US craft brewers. Barnet's Pryor Reid IPA was brewed to a Victorian recipe. Before US craft keg and bottle brewers rediscovered such old recipes, IPA had become a low strength session beer indistinguishable from any other bitter. Craft beer hasn't just inspired brewers to try something new and different, but also to dig back deeper into our own past. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">And so it goes on, all the way through the beer list: Brick's American pale ale brewed with Cascade, Simcoe and Mosaic, Canopy's session IPA, Clarkshaw's Darker Hell - a dark lager, East London's Oatmeal Stout brewed with vanilla, Howling Hops' double chocolate coffee toffee vanilla milk porter, One Mile End's blood orange wheat double IPA, Uprising's wheat beer with American hops, Southwark's Russian Imperial Stout...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The dependable milds and best bitters, the golden ales and ESBs are still there. But before craft beer came along, every brewer in the room would have been brewing in the same narrow template. The number of breweries is soaring. The range of cask beers those brewers are creating is unprecedented. And attendance creeps steadily upwards. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The first generation of American craft brewers were inspired by British cask ales from the likes of Fuller's and Young's. In turn, those American craft brewers are inspiring British brewers to brew not just 'craft keg' beers, but also breathe new life and creativity into cask. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">If craft keg really is the enemy of cask ale, it's doing a terrible job of trying to kill off cask, which has never looked more vibrant.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-24936021597595573082017-03-02T10:22:00.001+00:002017-03-02T12:34:48.739+00:00New Book News: not for the first time, I'm trying to copy the great Iain Banks...<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">One of the greatest British novelists of the last fifty years, the late Iain Banks developed parallel tracks in his book publishing. Irritatingly and wonderfully prolific, he'd a write 'mainstream' </span></b></i><i><b><span style="font-size: large;">fiction</span></b></i><i><b><span style="font-size: large;">'Iain Banks' book one year followed by an 'Iain M Banks' book set in his stunningly detailed and intricate sci-fi universe the next. While my books obviously won't be as anywhere near as good as his, and while they're resolutely non-fiction (at least for the time being) I'm hoping to adopt a similar method...</span></b></i><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">As I've written before, I was extremely lucky to find in Pan Macmillan a mainstream, large scale, award-winning publisher who was willing to pay me to write several books about beer and promote them to a broad, general audience. I was in the right place at <i>exactly</i> the right time.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">After three books that sold perfectly well but didn't trouble any bestseller lists, Pan Mac asked me to adapt my style to broader subjects and themes. My agent agreed, and it sounded like a good idea to me too. My fourth book, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shakespeares-Local-Pete-Brown/dp/1447236807/ref=pd_sbs_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=TKS3MMQZ1H2PA3VB62B5" target="_blank">Shakespeare's Local,</a></i> was a first step away from beer to broader social history. It was my most successful book launch at that point, and everyone felt they were right to gently encourage me to move further away from beer.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Since then, I've written books about <a href="http://petebrown.blogspot.ch/p/worlds-best-cider.html" target="_blank">cider</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-Orchard-Story-English-Fruit/dp/1846148839/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=TXGJKVP374N89MWKKXTK" target="_blank">apples</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pub-Cultural-Institution-Country-Corner/dp/1910254525/ref=pd_sim_14_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=ZHSVHYZQ87EFRND24215" target="_blank">pubs</a>. But I missed beer writing, and I felt like an idiot that in the midst of a craft beer boom like nothing we've ever seen, I was moving away from the subject I loved.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">So at the same time as writing <i>The Apple Orchard </i>- my last book, which is out in paperback next month - I joined up with innovative crowdfunding publisher <a href="https://unbound.com/" target="_blank">Unbound</a> to write a new beer book. I screwed up the timings quite badly, and <a href="http://petebrown.blogspot.ch/2016/04/why-i-havent-been-blogging-much.html" target="_blank">ended up trying to write three books at the same time</a>, but now I'm through the pain. <i>The Apple Orchard</i> did really well. (After long conversations with Pan Mac about it, we amicably parted ways and it was published by Penguin.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Exploring nature and the rhythms of the year, I discovered a new lyricism in my writing that's not always been there in the beer writing. So I want to do more along that line, at the same time as not giving up on beer. I want to have my cake and eat it (or should that be 'I want to have my pint and drink it'?)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">So: the <i>Apple Orchard</i> paperback is out on 6th April. I just got sent the paperback cover today, a subtle evolution of the hardback design, which I think is lovely:</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUxRUW-dKzZv6MiGopvmoqH82XEMPQYbtOV4lwi3dNm561BSValDMMWP6576HSyFakKyL2yuNIdvkTZc-MWXWN-T2K1pQ2zt-RzX_0pgFIDV7tR9d32EH-RKOCJU2meJTU7q8f1Q/s1600/Apple+Orchard+paperback+jacket.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUxRUW-dKzZv6MiGopvmoqH82XEMPQYbtOV4lwi3dNm561BSValDMMWP6576HSyFakKyL2yuNIdvkTZc-MWXWN-T2K1pQ2zt-RzX_0pgFIDV7tR9d32EH-RKOCJU2meJTU7q8f1Q/s400/Apple+Orchard+paperback+jacket.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">And then, 1st June sees the launch of <i>Miracle Brew</i>, my first beer book in eight years, via Unbound:</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJc0kRhVpK1AfQ8CIiMW1upZqzJmt4DpJSjcTyPBO1s7J3wiTaKuvUsKtLil2onTVWmV4ln07hCFAAuNjsz0XaWIlqo5XTy0eBkcZeEnQ-4WAIgdxMUU8LK16xX0upZHvmTKdH-g/s1600/Miracle+Brew+cover+art.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJc0kRhVpK1AfQ8CIiMW1upZqzJmt4DpJSjcTyPBO1s7J3wiTaKuvUsKtLil2onTVWmV4ln07hCFAAuNjsz0XaWIlqo5XTy0eBkcZeEnQ-4WAIgdxMUU8LK16xX0upZHvmTKdH-g/s640/Miracle+Brew+cover+art.jpg" width="396" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I'm currently checking the page proofs of <i>Miracle Brew </i>for any last typos or errors, and realising that writing about other stuff in between - particularly apples - has definitely brought something extra to a book about hops, barley, yeast and water. I'm really excited to start sharing it with people. (Even though the book is fully funded, you still have a short time left to pledge <a href="https://unbound.com/books/miracle-brew" target="_blank">here</a> and get your name in the back and get other benefits. Or if you prefer to do things the old-fashioned way, you can pre-order it on Amazon <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Miracle-Brew-Barley-Water-Nature/dp/1783523352/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_11?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=HEB9Q6QC2D8P11RHVSXB" target="_blank">here</a> just like any other book.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Books take a long time to write, and I've always struggled to get the period between books to shrink. But now I'm on a bit of a roll. So while this year will see me on the road promoting the <i>Apple Orchard</i> paperback and the new hardback of <i>Miracle Brew</i>, today I signed the contract on my <i>next</i> book, which should see the light of day in autumn 2018!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">This one is with Penguin again, the follow-up to <i>The Apple Orchard</i>. I had two ways to go from that book: I could develop the whole nature writing theme more, or I could continue to expand from beer into a broader food and drink arena. While there are lots of very good writers in both disciplines, I felt nature was the more overcrowded, and food and drink the one I was more excited about.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">So I pitched an idea in January, and it was approved and bought quicker than any book I've written to date. The roots of it go back at least seven years, when, touring <i><a href="http://petebrown.blogspot.ch/p/hops-and-glory.html" target="_blank">Hops & Glory</a></i>, I started getting invited to a lot more food festivals and events. And it's based around the notion that food and drink form a large part of how we see ourselves - and in Britain's case, point to a very confused and uncertain self-image.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">It's a global joke that British food is a bit crap - and Brits are at least as likely to say that as anyone else. When British people do stick up for their food, they usually point out that we have restaurants representing more different international cuisines in cities like London than anywhere else, or that British chefs are modernising and doing fusion with pan-Asian cuisine or 'modern European.' If they do celebrate traditional British dishes, they invariably add a cosmopolitan 'twist', just so everyone can be sure they'd never do anything as vulgar as simply make a traditional dish really well. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">There are exceptions to this of course, but the general theme I pick up is that no one is that keen on celebrating traditional British food and drink. It's why British craft beer fans will denigrate cask ale and British brewers would rather use American hops. Its why Somerset farmhouse cider is laughed at by people who adore Belgian lambic, when it's almost the same drink in many ways. Its why a craft beer festival that is passionate about showcasing local brewers will have endless food stalls doing mac 'n' cheese, Texan barbecue and hot dogs, but not British street food such as pie and peas. It's why France has more cheeses protected under the European Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) and Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) schemes than Britain does for all its food and drink put together, and why the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) still has absolutely no clue whatsoever about how it's going to protect Melton Mowbray pork pies, Stilton cheese, Herefordshire perry and the rest of Britain's protected produce once Brexit means they no longer qualify for the EU protections they currently enjoy.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">And yet, when surveys ask people what their favourite meals are, the vast majority invariably come up with fish and chips, full English (or Welsh, or Scottish, or Northern Irish) breakfast, and Sunday Roast. In terms of consumption, this isn't true of course: most of us eat Italian, or Chinese, or burgers way more often than we eat these staples. Large swathes of the population are far more likely to go to a faux-Italian coffee chain and have pain-aux-chocolats or croissants, or more recently, the heavily Americanised concept of brunch, than go for a full English. But when asked, these are the meals, along with Devon cream teas, cheese sarnies and bacon butties, that we still feel some patriotic pride about.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">This brings up the whole issue of multiculturalism - curry has famously become defined as a British dish. But go back far enough, and what is British and what is multicultural start to blur. The first curry restaurant in Britain opened in 1809, only 15 years or so after it became socially acceptable for image-conscious Brits to eat potatoes.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">To tie all these thoughts and themes together, I'm going to eat seven of Britain's favourite meals in their ideal settings: full English in a greasy spoon, fish and chips by the seaside, Sunday Roast in a country pub, and so on. For each meal, I'll explore its origins and history, why it became so important to us, and what it tells us about how we see ourselves and our place in the world in 2017. I'm starting work on it with a fascinating new reading list:</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8lizTN4blFmXDcETlSvz0gfPGXX_z_t2lSKNcMwBmxgMg2IfIDk7FutRngGbJZ_cCS9P8ZFYHtX_pJcUfe492y1FgDgotCZcn940KT3hpqJdnbf93ZUPbh0nLfEfP9pTRuwfy8g/s1600/IMG_2621.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8lizTN4blFmXDcETlSvz0gfPGXX_z_t2lSKNcMwBmxgMg2IfIDk7FutRngGbJZ_cCS9P8ZFYHtX_pJcUfe492y1FgDgotCZcn940KT3hpqJdnbf93ZUPbh0nLfEfP9pTRuwfy8g/s640/IMG_2621.JPG" width="480" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">With this as-yet-untitled book due out in 2018, this establishes the beginnings of a pattern of annually alternating beer books and books with broader themes. I won't go as far as differentiating them by calling myself Pete Brown in one strand and Peter S Brown in the other, but I hope it's a pattern I'll be able to continue for a few years - I have a very tentative conversation next week about a possible new beer book.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I hope at least one of these strands will continue to interest you. Thanks for reading.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-20230743368836528852017-02-20T08:11:00.000+00:002017-02-20T08:13:03.908+00:00Remembering Lunchtime Drinking<span style="font-size: large;">So Lloyds of Londo</span><span style="font-size: large;">n <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/15/city-workers-lloyds-london-banned-daytime-drinking/" target="_blank">announced last week</a> that it </span><span style="font-size: large;">is banning its employees from drinking at lunchtime.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Under strict new rules, anyone found to have enjoyed a pint between the hours of 9 to 5 faces the prospect of being fired for 'gross misconduct.'</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Having frequently been in City of London pubs at the same time as some of these often boorish drinkers, my first thought was not to spare them any tears. The move comes in response to 50% of disciplinary incidents at the firm apparently having to do with staff members being over-refreshed. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">But whatever your views on our financial colleagues, just let that phrase roll around for a second: drinking alcohol during your lunch break is 'gross misconduct'. Not getting drunk. Not failing to complete your job because you're pissed. But having one drink. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">This ban is symbolic of the ever tightening stigma of drinking alcohol - and of changing public opinion - and I fear it's the first of many similar measures to come.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-TuwnP3IerFm4coZt8vbkK5PuOxbO9-OzugqnucCxI84tGUAXcIBA_xf4zSH5vgbWJjbLKm0DIQvUE9wwUdATEuN276a-F9xlVm1pOgSPy_p5b86dC_QFyk_JXoPR7ub4lKSPjQ/s1600/Alcohol+with+lunch-01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-TuwnP3IerFm4coZt8vbkK5PuOxbO9-OzugqnucCxI84tGUAXcIBA_xf4zSH5vgbWJjbLKm0DIQvUE9wwUdATEuN276a-F9xlVm1pOgSPy_p5b86dC_QFyk_JXoPR7ub4lKSPjQ/s400/Alcohol+with+lunch-01.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">But according to YouGov, Lloyds are in line with public opinion. I guess I'm not. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I started my first job in 1991, at an advertising agency in Central London. At that time advertising had a glamorous reputation, but that wasn't the reason I joined: I just wanted a job that would be different every day, one that would be interesting and intellectually challenging, and accountancy (which is what my university tried to push everyone into) didn't seem to offer that. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I started as a graduate trainee in the middle of a recession, and to most of the people in advertising, this was the first recession they'd noticed, because it was the first that had had a serious impact on the south east. (Coming from Barnsley, I'd just assumed the early 90s recession was simply a continuation of the early 80s recession - I had no idea that some parts of the country had enjoyed a boom between the two.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">So advertising in the early 1990s was like turning up to a splendid mansion on a Monday morning and finding a Rolls Royce in the swimming pool, fag butts stubbed out in champagne glasses, TVs still smoking from having their screens smashed in, and my new bosses minesweeping empty bottles and greeting me with, "Man, I can't believe you missed the eighties. It was so great here then. We had such a party, a party like you wouldn't believe. Where <i>were</i> you? Now get this mess cleaned up, the place is a tip."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">(Don't feel sorry for me. When I tell this story to people who work in advertising today, their reaction is along the lines of "There were <i>parties</i> here once? Bollocks, I don't believe you.")</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">But there were various hangovers of different kinds from that decade of excess. At least once a week during the 90s, the 'Jolly Trolley' would be wheeled down the corridor connecting our veal-fattening pens. It was someone's birthday, someone was leaving, someone had got a promotion, we'd won a new piece of business - there was always an excuse. Me and the other graduate recruits were usually too busy to join the festivities, but when we finished work around 8pm, long after the party had moved on to the pub, we'd scavenge the Jolly Trolley for unopened bottles to take home. For my first 18 months in London, I practically subsisted on stolen crisps, warm Budweiser and cheap, shitty champagne. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Often, we'd have a mild buzz before the Jolly Trolley even appeared. Frequently, client meetings would run over lunch, and at 1pm a trolley that was only marginally less jolly, loaded with crisps and sandwiches, would be wheeled into the meeting room and unloaded onto the middle of the table. Behind this first trolley, a second full of wine and beer would follow, and people would crack open the booze without even breaking the flow of whoever was presenting acetates on the overhead projector. This was normal. No one even commented on it. From that point, we would drink steadily and moderately until the meeting was over. (I don't remember anyone ever finishing the meeting pissed.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I can't remember when the drinks trolleys stopped. I didn't notice them becoming rarer and finally disappearing. But some time in the early noughties I was in a lunchtime meeting with Pret sandwiches and cans of Coke and I remembered the lunchtime booze trolley for the first time in many years. I realised that not only had it disappeared; if anyone suggested bringing it back now they would be censured for suggesting something so inappropriate. Somewhere along the line, without it being discussed, the idea of drinking alcohol in a daytime business meeting had become completely unacceptable. Everyone simply knew it was, just as everyone had known a decade previously that its was fine. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Back when advertising was boozier, the ads were much better, and people enjoyed the job more. I'm not going to argue that the presence of booze was the main reason for this; all I am saying is that when people were drinking, the job still got done. Good ads got made and those ads did good business for the clients. The standard of work did not dramatically increase when the booze disappeared. People were made to work harder and longer, but if anything, the quality of the work they produce has declined. Just watch a commercial break if you don't believe me.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">You should be able to trust grown adults to occasionally go to the pub at lunchtime without coming back to the workplace sozzled. If people drink at lunchtime to the point where it affects their work, then they should be reprimanded for it, but the crime should be the sloppy work or unacceptable behaviour, not the drinking itself.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Workplace drinking has beneficial effects as well as negative ones, and while there's no measurement of them, I suspect they're more widespread than the bad behaviour. A quiet pint can smooth things over, avoid problems, thank someone, share problems or create bonds. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">When I visited Japan for my book <i>Three Sheets to the Wind</i>, I discovered that beer solves an apparent paradox in the Japanese workplace. Japanese salarymen tend to give little of themselves away in the workplace, but will only do business with those they know and trust. How do you get to know and trust someone if the shields are always up? Beer symbolizes a switch from 'on' to 'off', a ritualised movement from formality to informality, to a time when they are permitted to bond and share. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Maybe they don't do it at lunchtime, so it's not quite the same as the plight of Lloyds drinkers. But to ban lunchtime drinking outright, rather than punish any negative consequences of it, stigmatises drinking in general. And if you're lucky enough to still get a lunch break, it's your own time. If drinking is wrong at lunchtime, then surely it's not ideal at other times either? What next: a ban on evening drinking from Monday to Thursday to get rid of the detrimental effects of weekday hangovers?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I have no desire to get pissed with city boys. But thinking about it, and mangling a quote traditionally attributed to Voltaire, when it comes to their drinking, I disapprove of their twattish, drunken behaviour, but I will defend to the death their right to be drunken twats.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-38660912506519792082017-01-16T12:49:00.003+00:002017-02-02T12:39:25.925+00:00Tasting Beer: Some Thoughts and Reflections<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i><b>Being faced with a flight of beers I had no desire to drink made me think philosophically for a bit, and wonder if there's a different narrative to tasting and enjoying beer.</b></i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I love judging the <a href="http://www.brusselsbeerchallenge.com/" target="_blank">Brussels Beer Challenge</a>. It's one of my favourite competitions, because it's global in scope, but it happens in Belgium, which means the beers you're tasting during judging sessions have to measure up to the beers you drink in a typical bar round the corner. Last year I had to judge 24 Belgian-style Tripels in the morning, and then we visited the Trappist brewery at Westmalle in the afternoon, and drank Westmalle Tripel and... well, it would be rude to the breweries entering the competition to complete that thought. Some of them tried </span><span style="font-size: large;">really h</span><span style="font-size: large;">ard. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Last November, I was judging again in Brussels. You never know what category you're going to get. You accept you're going to get some that you're not best friends with, but hope that it'll balance out and that you'll get some good ones. Sometimes - as I found with the Tripels the year before - getting a style you love can be a mixed blessing. But can it work the other way round? Can you find something wonderful in a category you think you hate?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">At 9.15 that Saturday morning, I found out: 47 fruit beers were waiting to be sipped, savoured and scored.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">These were not <i>Berlinerweiss</i> with added fruit, nor fruit IPAs nor <i>krieks</i>. These were beers where fruit (or fruit syrup, or concentrate) was the main flavour. I rarely, if ever, drink these beers. The whole table was trepidatious about the promised assault on our precious palates. How to judge them?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">There were style guidelines, and in many competitions, judging to style is the most important point: you can find the best beer you've ever tasted in your life, but if it has more colour units or hop character or a lower or higher ABV than the guidelines say, you have to mark it down, so I always prefer the competitions that give some leeway as to whether it's a good beer or not. But with a style I reject as a drinker, how should I judge its appeal beyond whether it was 'to style' or not? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">In thinking this through, I started to think about how we taste and enjoy beer. The vast majority of people who drink beer don't spend too much time thinking about what's going on in the mouth, and that's fine - beer is a social lubricant, and while you're drinking it, most of your attention is focused elsewhere. Just like when you read half a page of a book and realise you haven't taken it in because you've been thinking about something else, or there's music playing and you can't recall what the last few songs were because you were listening to your friend talking, there's a big difference between sensory stimulus being picked up by your mouth, nose, eyes etc., and your brain actually paying any attention to it. When we <i>taste</i> beer, as opposed to drinking it, the biggest difference is not in the size or shape of the glass, the sniffing and swirling; it's in the simple act of directing your attention to the beer itself rather than anything else. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I've seen many craft beer fans necking beers they've paid a lot of money for and which they profess a deep understanding of. There's nothing wrong with that - even if you get stuck into the sensory impressions on the first couple of sips, you'd look a bit of a dick if you continued to focus on it throughout the entire glass, to the exclusion of everything else happening around you. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">But sometimes, those of us who do love beer really do want to interrogate what's going on with it, and not just when you're judging. A huge chunk of beer writing consists of tasting notes of different beers. But here's my problem, informed by reading Beer Advocate and Rate Beer, and by sitting with beer experts judging competitions: too often, tasting beer can descend into a pissing contest about who can pick up and identify what different elements are in the beer. Whether that's correctly identifying the hops or malts used, or being able to 'get' notes of hibiscus, salted caramel, cuban cigars or whatever, I always worry that tasting notes along these lines are more about the taster than the beer. Here's an example I picked at random, years ago, from Beer Advocate, to make the point:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>“After swirling a bit I am getting some creosote, faint hop background, malt wort. Taste is bitter and dry, strong roasty presence, a bit like old coffee grounds. Finishes out with some astringency.”</i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">If you're into your beer these days, and you frequent sites like this, that probably makes a lot of sense to you. But what's it doing, really? I honestly can't tell from this description whether the taster actually likes the beer or not, and from this, I can't be sure whether I would or not, either. Is identifying a series of disparate parts and impressions the same thing as describing a beer, or appreciating it? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I don't think so. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Think about literature, about reading the introduction of a new character. When did you last read a description along the lines of "She was about five feet four, with mid-brown hair. She was caucasian, approximately thirty years of age, wearing a navy blue skirt and jacket over white blouse, finished with a Laura Ashley scarf and black shoes."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">This is what you get in a police report, not a piece of creative writing. It describes a person, but gives me no idea of who that person is, whether I would be interested in talking to her, or why I should be interested in meeting her. A good novelist can give you a brilliant picture of a real person without mentioning any of these details. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">But I'm meant to be talking about tasting, not writing. The thing is, if we accept that this identity parade of flavour notes is what tasting beer is meant to be like, we feel pressured to simply spot as many and unusual constituent parts as we can rather than thinking about the whole. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Faced with my fruit beers, I realised this would be no good. Here's a strawberry beer. "I'm getting strawberries." OK, thanks. That would be it. But the thing is, in that tasting session, I tasted good strawberry beers (well, one) and bad. What was the difference between them?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The good one tasted like a beer that had strawberry flavour in it, rather than like strawberry soda. You could still tell it was beer. And the strawberry tasted of strawberry, rather than strawberry syrup. And the strawberry part and the beer part harmonised and felt like they belonged together. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">By the end of the morning I'd enjoyed several of the beers, and I'd scribbled out some thoughts on how, if I'm in an analytical mood, I might get more from tasting beer than I do from the prevailing spot-the-flavour-note model.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">APPEARANCE</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">In an age of cloudy craft beers, this is problematic, and we allocate it too many marks in beer competitions. Some truly revolting beers look clean, bright and sparkling, and score better than they should because of it. It's also dependent on the context of the beer you've ordered. Does it look like you expected it to? Does it look like you want it to? Does it make you want to drink it?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">AROMA</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">This is where we create the competition to see who can spot what, and wine is no different from beer. It's also where any taster opens themselves up to accusations of pretentiousness. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">It's flawed to give aroma too much attention all the time, because humans actually get most of our aroma sensations from 'retronasal olfaction,' meaning you really get it when it's in your mouth/when you're swallowing, and it passes up to your nasal cavity from the back of your throat, and past your olfactory bulb as you breathe out through your nose. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Instead of thinking of this stage as an identity parade of flavour notes, what if you think of it as a courtship? Is there any aroma at all? If not, why not? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Despite the retronasal thing, this is a big indicator (though not a foolproof one) of the main event. Aroma should entice you. Does it put you off instead? Or does it make you want to plunge in? With some great and powerful beers, the aroma makes me want to carry on sniffing, almost forgetting to drink. On a few rare occasions, as with fresh coffee or freshly baked bread, the delivery may not even live up to the aroma's promise. But overall, I'm looking for aroma to increase the anticipation and desire of drinking. However it might do that, if it isn't doing it, it's not working.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">TASTE</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Obviously, this is the main event. In the first second in which the beer enters your mouth, there's an initial flash of flavour sensation, before your rational, analytical brain kicks in. Can you capture that and appreciate it? How does it make you feel? I'm increasingly of the opinion that to really get this, you should start by taking a generous swig rather than a dainty sip. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Once it develops, is there a journey across the palate? Does it develop as it moves around your mouth, or as it sits there, or is it just a quick flash of something that quickly disappears? Is it complex or one-dimensional? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Here, I then start to think about whether I'm actually enjoying the beer, and depending on your level of comfort with this kind of reflection, this is where we get either pretentious or we separate good from bad: Is there a point to this beer? What's it trying to be, and does it succeed? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">If it's trying to be simple and direct and refreshing, does it do that job well or are there odd bits sticking out? (I've nothing against a clean, crisp lager, but if there are incongruent flavours due to poor technique or short lagering, they spoil what it's trying to do.) </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">If it's trying to be complex and rewarding, are all those constituent parts that beer-spotters love identifying so much working together or do they jar with each other? (I sometimes find complex craft beers to be a flabby collection of elements in search of an idea). </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">FINISH</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Aftertaste is a sensory experience - partly due to that retronasal thing, partly because some beers linger. How do you feel once you've swallowed that first sip? Are you satisfied? Do you want to drink more? This is revealing - how many times do you not feel this to be the case, but you force it down anyway, because you've paid for it? How many flabby beers do you finish with grim determination? And how many times does the finishing buzz compel you to raise the glass again, to try to complete a circle, to nag away at the desire the beer has created?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">By the time I got to the end of my flight of fruit beers, I'd enjoyed a few of them, and found the experience of tasting them - even the ones I didn't like - to be thoughtful and revealing. And I had some thoughts that help me appreciate beer rather than just tasting it. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">What do you think? How do you appreciate beer? Do you intellectualise it at all or just judge it by how quickly you finish a pint and how much you want to order another? Because after all that, when I look at a tasting flight in competitions, usually the easiest way of spotting my favourite is to look at which glass is nearly empty. </span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-46240555312178947422016-12-18T11:59:00.001+00:002016-12-18T13:21:18.638+00:00Beery Books for Christmas<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>Obviously you've already bought mine (or dropped strong hints to have it bought for you) but it's been a bumper year for beer books. Here are my three favourites of 2016.</b></i></span><br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The World Atlas of Beer</b> (second edition)</span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Tim Webb and Stephen Beaumont, Mitchell Beazley, RRP £25</i></span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQDN_S3mLc7OY1b_vGJTAej6zPqrU_dLA0qodk4cV_lLX5dlrqgRS5KqA94gStgj-fnnPF6Ep_KdH8YmELBPvTe8Sze5gW2sk0otad0r31-KzzJMA6xgxLMWM11N3OCX6-t5FHhQ/s1600/51BILwiZ0UL._AC_UL320_SR252%252C320_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQDN_S3mLc7OY1b_vGJTAej6zPqrU_dLA0qodk4cV_lLX5dlrqgRS5KqA94gStgj-fnnPF6Ep_KdH8YmELBPvTe8Sze5gW2sk0otad0r31-KzzJMA6xgxLMWM11N3OCX6-t5FHhQ/s400/51BILwiZ0UL._AC_UL320_SR252%252C320_.jpg" width="315"></a></div>
<br>
<span style="font-size: large;">Michael Jackson's first <i>World Guide to Beer</i> (and its vinous forerunner, Hugh Johnson's <i>World Atlas of Wine)</i> set a template for coffee table drinks books that has slowly mutated over the years, and spawned off-shoots in the 'how many beers to drink before you die' mould that seem to be hitting the shelves daily. I question the need for books like this, partly because there are so bloody many of them and they're all essentially the same, and partly because if you want beer reviews, the internet is a much more up-to-date and accessible way of getting them. But these books work because people love having them all in one place and ticking them off - or some people do, at any rate. </span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">What's surprising when you go back to Jackson's first book now is that there isn't a single page of bottle shots and tasting notes, just longer, highly readable articles about different countries, regions and styles. </span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">In this second edition of their guide - the first of which established Beaumont and Webb as the natural heirs to Jackson in the format he created - the authors managed to convince the publishers to get rid of the pages of bottle shot and tasting notes that have crept in over the years, and use the space instead to actually write about beer rather than simply cataloguing it. That makes this book a blast of fresh air in a format that's become stuffy.</span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The world of good beer has expanded greatly since Jackson first mapped it out, and that's why a book like this today needs two authors, one on either side of the Atlantic, if it is to be as authoritative as it needs to be. Both Webb and Beaumont have been writing about beer for decades - they have about sixty years experience between them. They still travel regularly to both the obvious beer countries - the US, Belgium, Germany, UK - and those that are rapidly emerging as new craft beer stars, such as Brazil, Spain, Japan. </span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">At times the book's scope is stretched a little too thin - some of the minor countries get a page with a nice photo and just enough room to list three or four up-and-coming craft brewers - but in the countries you really want to read about, no one does it better than these two. They combine their knowledge with a very dry wit, and don't suffer fools gladly. The tone is calm scholarship rather than breathless enthusiasm, and they're unafraid to be critical. But on every page you feel like you're in the company of experts who love their subject.</span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>(Like big, epic beer tomes? You should also check out the gargantuan Belgian Beer Book by Erik Verdonck and Luc de Raedemaeker, Lanoo, RRP £45.) </i></span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Beer in So Many Words</b></span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Adrian Tierney-Jones (editor), Safe Haven Books in association with The Homewood Press, RRP £14.99</i></span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-oBwZ7JlcoLOmGRNHBjh1pXPT_jUZGNna2qiP0ecG0tP7USN-6qHstBdt0Tz7rxbNXTDMBzTFyRLer8qzEFS6Tzmbp9jPpQdzHZHB0qy_vsrKgXTCD3mBXUxXbQZpgrmpHqPo-Q/s1600/51wRagcbfJL._SX325_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-oBwZ7JlcoLOmGRNHBjh1pXPT_jUZGNna2qiP0ecG0tP7USN-6qHstBdt0Tz7rxbNXTDMBzTFyRLer8qzEFS6Tzmbp9jPpQdzHZHB0qy_vsrKgXTCD3mBXUxXbQZpgrmpHqPo-Q/s400/51wRagcbfJL._SX325_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="260"></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">It's not just beer writers who write about beer, and not all beer writing is good. To pull together an anthology of the best writing about beer (as opposed to 'beer writing') requires an extensive knowledge of the subject as well as being well-read much more broadly. </span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The contents page of the book is a delight to read in itself. As a community, beer geeks and writers need to be reminded fairly regularly that beer doesn't belong just to us, that it's a popular drink that is appreciated by a wide range of people. And here, names like Boak and Bailey, Roger Protz, Jeff Evans, Melissa Cole and, well, me, rub shoulders with Dylan Thomas, Ian Rankin, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene and Charles Dickens. </span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">This is a book to lose yourself in, to wander back and forth through, to put down briefly and take a sip of something dark and rich while you ponder. It's themed in sections: The Taste of Beer, Beer in Pubs, Beer People, Brewing, Beer Journeys, Beer and Food and The Meaning of Beer. It reminds you of what made you fall in love with beer (and reading, and writing) and is highly likely to give you fresh perspectives and insights on a subject you thought you knew all about. </span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>(Like anthologies of writing about beer? You should also check out </i></span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>CAMRA's Beer Anthology: a Pub Crawl through British Culture, edited by Roger Protz, CAMRA, RRP £9.99)</i></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Food and Beer</b></span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Daniel Burns and Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergso, Phaidon, RRP £29.95</i></span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpnY6wPoIpg0aPIU350TTFja00skZ2Nh_EXlNa9_AX9osGLYWMlF-D9OnnWheJld_DhJwiLNP5XSfBnRFj1x36_e0W4lZGLmAFO82OyZwg3QnL2FODO2doDtaj9YfjLJfWu42hlA/s1600/9780714871059-620-new1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpnY6wPoIpg0aPIU350TTFja00skZ2Nh_EXlNa9_AX9osGLYWMlF-D9OnnWheJld_DhJwiLNP5XSfBnRFj1x36_e0W4lZGLmAFO82OyZwg3QnL2FODO2doDtaj9YfjLJfWu42hlA/s400/9780714871059-620-new1.jpg" width="308"></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Of all the avalanche of beer books being published right now, the most dramatic trend is in books about beer and food. Within the last couple of years, I've acquired a whole bookshelf full on this subject alone.</span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I'm a keen cook, and am always looking for inspiration. I use some of these books often, but am often frustrated that most of them seem to consist mainly of big hunks of red meat, of burgers, wings and pulled pork, of melted cheese and stout-braised ribs and sticky puddings with rich glazes. I'm sure it's all very nice, but I'm already bored of the kind of food because it seems to be the only thing you ever get served in craft-centric pubs and bars. When I get home, I want to eat more healthily. At the same time, I want to push my cooking skills, taking time out of writing to do something absorbing and satisfying, learning new techniques and skills. </span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">'Food and Beer' may not be the most exciting title of a book about food and beer (I've already got three different books called Beer and Food, and one other Food and Beer) but this is the topic getting a higher end, classier treatment than it's ever had so far, and it's no accident that 'food' comes first in the title. Chef Daniel Burns has cooked at Noma and the Fat Duck, and gypsy brewer Jeppe Jarnit-Bergso founded Evil Twin brewing and also worked as beer director at Noma, routinely billed as the best restaurant in the world. </span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">What I like about this book is that there's stuff that is insanely ambitious for an amateur like me, with those kinds of recipe that are actually five separate recipes nested within one big dish that require two days of work. But there are also relatively simple things to test yourself out with - anyone can make a heritage tomato sandwich with cider-infused mayonnaise.</span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Having put this book through its paces in my kitchen, it has one major flaw. A friend of mine works as a recipe tester for various celebrity chefs, taking their ideas and cooking them in her well-appointed but strictly domestic kitchen, and working out the timings, quantities and temperatures that actually work in a kitchen a little less awesome than Noma's. Like several other beer and food books I've acquired this year, this book really, desperately, needed her input. Some of the quantities in recipes are utterly nonsensical (Welsh Rarebit that contains ten times the volume of double cream to that of cheese? <i>Really</i>?) and whatever oven they worked out the cooking times on bears no relationship whatsoever to how mine works. </span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">But with that fairly significant caveat aside, this is a book that combines two elements I've always wanted from a beer and food book: one, it seriously elevates beer as both an accompaniment and an ingredient. There's nothing wrong with beer being allied with hearty pub and bar fare, but it's good to see it in <i>haute cuisine</i>, showing its adaptability and scope. And secondly, it inspires me to be a better cook, and makes me believe I can stretch and do some of the more challenging dishes. (Although it might be a while before I attempt the pork broth and smoked egg whites on chrysanthemum base paired with smoked wheat beer.) </span><br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>(Like reading about how beer and food go together? Also check out Mark Dredge's Cooking With Beer, Dog & Bone, RRP £16.99)</i></span><br>
<br>
<br>
Disclosure: I'm good friends with the authors of the first book and the editor of the second one. One big reason we're good friends is that we admire each other's work. I genuinely love these books, and have tried not to let friendship bias me in my opinion of them.<br>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br></span>
<br>
<br>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-30062579375710317932016-12-04T11:16:00.000+00:002016-12-04T13:44:14.179+00:00Beer Writer of the Year<span style="font-size: large;">On Thursday night the British Guild of Beer Writers named me their Beer Writer of the Year, for the third time. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu9_n6-hP0mKsStO5_MqoHf8RSulrwHVThBq5y_jDVuKdho0Yn9he-6J1myMMS_ONOPgJL1dIwfs3oRbASVpIrJcJMqOOz8xZV2Ny1SAyGuCI1Nqwi9_4XI5DpmGjmuEVx79Y0Vg/s1600/guildwin1216.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu9_n6-hP0mKsStO5_MqoHf8RSulrwHVThBq5y_jDVuKdho0Yn9he-6J1myMMS_ONOPgJL1dIwfs3oRbASVpIrJcJMqOOz8xZV2Ny1SAyGuCI1Nqwi9_4XI5DpmGjmuEVx79Y0Vg/s400/guildwin1216.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I even bought a suit.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">It caps an incredible year for me and I'm obviously delighted. But I still wouldn't recommend three simultaneous book contracts to anyone, and won't be repeating this trick any time soon.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I won two categories before picking up the overall award. First was Best Writing in Trade Media, for my columns in the <i>Morning Advertiser</i>. Luck always plays a big part in any success, and I think this year I was particularly lucky to have some great stories fall into my lap. The rediscovery by Carlsberg of the earliest generation of modern brewing yeast, and their successful attempt to 're-brew' with it, was a unique event. And my chance to interview the man who invented nitro dispense - the technology that makes Guinness so distinctive and is now being explored by forward-thinking craft brewers - just weeks before his passing was something I'll always remember. The research for my forthcoming book on beer ingredients also led me to some stories that I could write up as columns without taking anything away from the book. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">In case you're interested, here are links to the pieces wot won it:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/Pete-Brown-travels-to-the-beery-Jurassic-Park">http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/Pete-Brown-travels-to-the-beery-Jurassic-Park</a></span><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/The-man-who-created-the-nitro-stout">http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/The-man-who-created-the-nitro-stout</a></span><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/War-torn-Zatec-brewery-s-gluten-free-beer">http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/War-torn-Zatec-brewery-s-gluten-free-beer</a></span><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/Saisons-were-originally-designed-for-farm-workers-not-craft-beer-hipsters-on-beer-flavour">http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/Saisons-were-originally-designed-for-farm-workers-not-craft-beer-hipsters-on-beer-flavour</a></span><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/Defining-the-difference-between-craft-and-premium-beer">http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/Defining-the-difference-between-craft-and-premium-beer</a></span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/How-hoppy-craft-beer-is-set-to-change">http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/How-hoppy-craft-beer-is-set-to-change</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I also won Best Writing in National Media mainly, I think, for my new book <i>The Pub: A Cultural Institution </i>(<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pub-Cultural-Institution-Country-Corner/dp/1910254525/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=JMBQ483PBT9GH0AKFAFZ" target="_blank">which is currently being sold insanely cheaply on Amazon</a>), but I also entered pieces I've written for <i><a href="http://www.fermentmagazine.com/" target="_blank">Ferment</a></i> and <i><a href="http://belgianbeerandfood.com/" target="_blank">Belgian Beer and Food</a></i> magazines. I'm not the only decent writer in these excellent magazines - if you haven't done so already, you should do yourself a favour and check them out.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">As I said on the night, I owe the success of <i>The Pub</i> to Jo Copestick, a long-standing editor and publisher who specialise in food and drink and design, who has worked with and encouraged most good beer writers out there. We first spoke about the idea for The Pub ten years ago. She plays the long game, and she made this book finally happen. Even though it's my name on the front I'm only a third of the team. People's first reaction to it is that it's a very beautiful book, and that is nothing to do with me and everything to do with Jo and designer Paul Palmer-Edwards at <a href="http://www.gradedesign.com/" target="_blank">Grade Design</a>. Sitting around the table with these two and being perfectionist about layout after layout was a wonderful working experience.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Having won these two categories, the judges then decided that overall, I was their Beer Writer of the Year. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">It's a trick of the order in which these awards are presented that my two awards were near the end of the evening. Earlier, it had looked like Mark Dredge was going to walk away with the big gong after sweeping Best Food and Drink Writing for his book, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cooking-Beer-lagers-delicious-recipes/dp/1909313890/ref=pd_sim_14_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=TDB9N25BXKCXEK5T18KZ" target="_blank">Cooking With Beer</a></i>, and Best Beer and Travel Writing for his book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Beer-World-search-perfect/dp/1909313718/ref=pd_sim_14_7?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=RQND7GVTNZNGSSEC6KNG" target="_blank">The Best Beer in the World</a></i>. I really hope this isn't the start of a trend of publishing multiple books in a year because that way madness lies, but hearty congratulations to Mark for running me so close, and to the winners and runners-up in all the other categories. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Some of the stuff you hear around all awards ceremonies gets so repetitive it sounds platitudinous, but when you're in the thick of it, phrases like 'the standard was really high this year' and 'the quality of entries continues to improve' get repeated because they are true. Having won this year, I'll be chair of the judges next year. I've done this twice before. It's always an interesting task, but the quality of work, often from writers I've never previously come across, scares me even as it delights me. No doubt this time next year, I'll be here writing 'the standard of entries was very high this year' and 'the judge's decision was an extremely difficult one.' </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I already know this will be true. As beer continues to excite greater numbers of people in all walks of life, many who fall in love with beer want to communicate their passion, and more and more of them are very good at it. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">For a full list of winners in all categories, and comments from the judges, see the full press release <a href="http://beerguild.co.uk/guild-of-beer-writers-recognises-talent-with-annual-awards/" target="_blank">here</a>.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-54685293626856958422016-11-29T11:22:00.002+00:002016-11-29T13:19:17.341+00:00The Pub - On Tour<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>My new book on pubs spans the whole of the UK. So it only seems fair to take it back to the places where it was researched.</b></i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Still need that elusive Christmas present for that difficult-to-buy-for person? Looking for an evening to kick off Christmas party season? I'm taking my new book (well, one of them) on tour. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimo4lC6KnV2mm31NljeHRUYF76gW0DlBioQLbx66tfnD1AI_AaZTNA48FsILSePAR2Go_nWKGlu5y46z6YYG8krUlheJr2SptqNRnjA_3c12VADm_FOSuBZpbp6m1yN_7R6NZjAQ/s1600/The+Pub+Low+Res.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimo4lC6KnV2mm31NljeHRUYF76gW0DlBioQLbx66tfnD1AI_AaZTNA48FsILSePAR2Go_nWKGlu5y46z6YYG8krUlheJr2SptqNRnjA_3c12VADm_FOSuBZpbp6m1yN_7R6NZjAQ/s400/The+Pub+Low+Res.jpg" width="343" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pub-Cultural-Institution-Country-Corner/dp/1910254525/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=9WQ94TYX375P60HYAB48" target="_blank">The Pub</a></i> is a coffee table, illustrated book that celebrates the unique cultural institution of the British pub. But it's more than that. The main reason most people choose a pub is because of its atmosphere, but atmosphere is very tricky to write about. I've given it the best shot I can. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">In these events, I'll be reading a selection from the fifty short essays in the book that seek to evoke the atmosphere of the best pubs I came across - best in that respect anyway. These are not the best beer pubs or food pubs, nor the most historic or architecturally stunning (though many of them do score highly in these attributes.) They're the pubs that feel special when you walk in, that feel like home, even if you can't immediately figure out why.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">But it would get dull if I just read out lots of short essays. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">So I'll also be illustrating my talk with a selection of the stunning photography from the book, giving you what I'm told is a fiendishly hard pub quiz to do, holding the Great Crisp Flavour Challenge, and contravening intellectual property rights with my travesty of <a href="http://www.bullseyetvgameshow.com/" target="_blank">Bullseye</a>. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">These are the dates we managed to fit in before Christmas. There are some glaringly obvious gaps here which I aim to fill in the New Year. (Norwich, Leeds and London being among the main candidates.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidZQUxki9JHcmz3iH3h0qgqr-osZDXTrh1jev-VFjMUchOwSyoXEVYNASf4Wx3wpJ3T0k88IXFWRG-C5CfQG3HnevOoGSjpj4EkbkPDHb_zZa4MdjNWdnmonmQ2f9MfedY4nh3Gg/s1600/The+Pub+tour+main+flyer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidZQUxki9JHcmz3iH3h0qgqr-osZDXTrh1jev-VFjMUchOwSyoXEVYNASf4Wx3wpJ3T0k88IXFWRG-C5CfQG3HnevOoGSjpj4EkbkPDHb_zZa4MdjNWdnmonmQ2f9MfedY4nh3Gg/s640/The+Pub+tour+main+flyer.jpg" width="537" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">These events are in association with Waterstones, who will be selling books at the events, and each pub is, obviously, one that features in the book. Admission is free but tickets need to be booked in advance, and are available from <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/pete-browns-pub-tour-tickets-29308369121" target="_blank">eventbrite</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I had such great times in these places while I was researching the book. Hoping to repeat the experience. See you there.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-31578177414778382722016-11-07T09:32:00.004+00:002016-11-07T09:32:43.197+00:00Book of the Week<b><span style="font-size: large;">The Apple Orchard<i> - coming to a radio near you...</i></span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB8gJbc8E71mguIvnbVjIs6wDN1qfPnBPkLrxMBysL65x13QV555_O7nRzKkOWk8Upl0KndU1QdZNoKSPI0Z9nAwwoYN3umsefEylg7r-PNzOHK9fbHL3QHP40-gZoHeaRjSxsyA/s1600/353722022.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB8gJbc8E71mguIvnbVjIs6wDN1qfPnBPkLrxMBysL65x13QV555_O7nRzKkOWk8Upl0KndU1QdZNoKSPI0Z9nAwwoYN3umsefEylg7r-PNzOHK9fbHL3QHP40-gZoHeaRjSxsyA/s400/353722022.jpeg" width="247" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I'm enormously proud, and more than a little nervous, that this morning BBC Radio 4 will be broadcasting the first episode of the serialisation of my new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-Orchard-Story-English-Fruit/dp/1846148839/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=33HEZX3H242N5AR28DAG" target="_blank"><i>The Apple Orchard.</i> </a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">My last narrative book, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shakespeares-Local-Pete-Brown/dp/1447236807/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" target="_blank"><i>Shakespeare's Local</i></a>, was also Book of the Week, so I guess lightning can strike twice. It's an enormous honour to be chosen. <i>Shakespeare's Local</i> was read out by Tony 'Baldrick' Robinson, who made my words sound about 100 times funnier and more interesting than they read on the page. To follow that up, the producers decided they would like <i>The Apple Orchard</i> to be read by... me. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I can talk on radio just fine, but reading out something scripted is an entirely different skill, one I learned quickly in a studio in Glasgow three weeks ago. You can hear the results at 9.45am each day this week, Monday to Thursday.</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b081ld2t" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8HTm-vR_gpAkkcmsUi40G3FOLxIdkm6wA4Y-W79dqp0az7SUwZgsOWYKVRSyjxYmJB6BaFblrn5q5OpNQN67yX-cjL15G_v6N6Y-18Sns3V9XYLb6ZJqEqiVTjz_d5v933S9tUw/s400/BOTW.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">There are many different strands to <i>The Apple Orchard</i>. Most people who know me keep referring to it as my 'cider book', and I have to stop myself referring to it in that way still. There's a lot of cider drunk in the book, and cider production is addressed in detail towards the end, but it's mainly about the cycle of the apple year, the history and nature of apple cultivation, and the symbolism and significance of this fruit in our lives, what it tells us about systems of belief and how we make sense of the world. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">That's an awful lot to fit into four fifteen minute broadcasts, so the abridger at Radio 4 had to choose one thread to follow. He chose to focus on the cycle of the apple year and what needs to be done in the orchard at various times. So this week, you can hear about the origins of the apple and how it came to England, how I learn to prune and graft apple trees, and the joy of apple harvest. I think of it as a 'remix' of the book, with different elements shuffled around to create something new, simpler and leaner.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">This seemingly ordinary fruit is in fact one of the most potent symbols in our lives. It was a life-changing joy to unravel its story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">If you're not near a radio at 9.45am, you can catch up on iPlayer by following the link in the screen grab above. <i>The Apple Orchard</i> will be available for about 30 days.</span></div>
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<i><b>I</b></i><b><i>'ve been asked a lot if all this means I don't write about beer any more. I can assure you that I do. I'm doing the final edits to my new beer book this week, which will be available spring 2017. After I've finished that, I'll be blogging all the stuff about beer I didn't have time to address while I was working on these books. I'm also writing regularly for the Morning Advertiser, Original Gravity and Ferment magazines. </i></b></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-92006377966989910242016-10-24T15:25:00.003+01:002016-10-24T15:25:49.723+01:00Budweiser: You Can't Rush Plagiarism <span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>Seems like America's beer just can't stop stealing things from southern Bohemia...</b></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I was shocked late Friday night to see a really good beer ad from Budweiser. No, stop laughing. I've seen plenty of good <i>ads</i> from Bud before - stuff about frogs and lizards and <i>whazaaap</i>, but this was a <i>good beer ad</i>: it's true, it's centred on the product, and it says something good about the broader beer category - good lager takes time to mature. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Last I heard, Budweiser is matured for twenty days. That's not as long as the classic lagers of the Czech Republic and Germany are matured, but it's a hell of a lot longer than the 72 hours some leading brands allegedly spend in the brewery between mashing in and packaging. You may not like the (lack of) taste in Budweiser, but even now they do some things right, and deserve some credit for that. So I was pleased to see an ad that had made lager maturation look cool. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I said as much on Twitter and Facebook, and very quickly Simon George of Budweiser Budvar UK shot back that his new strategy is to focus on the Czech beer's astonishingly long lagering time - five times longer than the American beer. Budweiser Budvar has been running this copy for about nine months, albeit without the huge TV ad budgets US Bud can afford:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />The dispute between American Budweiser and Czech Budweiser Budvar is decades old. Bud founder Adolphus Busch told a court of law, on record, in 1894: “The idea was simple,” he testified, “to produce a beer of the same quality, colour and taste as the beer produced in Budejovice [the Czech name for the town known as Budweis in German] or Bohemia.” Even though that record exists, the company has since flatly denied that this it stole the name Budweiser from the town of Budweis, or even took any inspiration from there. (There's a lot more on this dispute in my book <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Sheets-Wind-Quest-Meaning/dp/0330442473/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1477318904&sr=8-2" target="_blank">Three Sheets to the Wind</a>.)</span><div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Budvar spent a long time capitalising on its David V Goliath relationship with Budweiser and has recently decided to move on and focus on its ageing process instead, as part of a new strategy to remain relevant in a market where craft beer means drinkers are more interested in product specifics. But it seems Budweiser are still hung up on their namesake. Nine months after Czech Budvar focused their marketing campaign on how long it takes to make their beer, American Budweiser focused their marketing campaign on how long it takes to make their beer:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Having stolen the idea, they've now gone the whole hog and even stolen the same copy. The Budvar headline above? 'You can't rush perfection.' Spot the difference in the Facebook link to the ad below.</span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Come on, Budweiser. You've already stolen your name from the town in which Budweiser Budvar is brewed. You've copied their advertising idea (albiet in a fine execution) and now even their copy, word for word. You employ some of the best and most expensive advertising agencies in the world (even if you do try to shaft them on costs.) Is this the best those agencies can do?</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-80319003215304036692016-10-18T12:12:00.000+01:002016-10-18T12:12:23.885+01:00The Campaign for Good Brown Beer<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">Is the boom in craft brewing actually narrowing the choice of different beer styles we have?</span></b></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Last week I was invited to Germany to attend the magnificent <a href="https://www.barconvent.com/" target="_blank">Bar Convent Berlin</a>, a huge trade show featuring a mind-boggling array of drinks producers across the board and from across the world, plus talks, seminars and debates. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yes, they have hipsters in Germany too. But this was an amazing trade show. </td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">This year there was a special focus on the UK, and I was asked if I'd run a tutored tasting with Sylvia Kopp, European Ambassador for the American <a href="https://www.brewersassociation.org/" target="_blank">Brewers' Association</a>, the idea being that we'd pick a variety of beer styles that were British in origin, and do side-by-side presentations of British and American beers in that style. It sounded like a lovely idea, so I readily agreed. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Sylvia checked with the American brewers at the show and came up with an attractive-looking list of styles:</span><br />
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<li><span style="font-size: large;">Brown ale</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">Scotch ale</span></li>
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<span style="font-size: large;">As a list, it has that warm glow of classic British beer about it. As a flight of beers, it felt comforting and autumnal, the corner pub on a rainy Tuesday night with a small fire in the grate and George Orwell sitting in the corner with a newspaper. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">And maybe, to young British brewers, that's the problem with it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Stout was straightforward enough, although we both ended up with flavoured styles rather than straightforward ones. IPA was of course very easy to find. But we wanted to put up a British style against an American style IPA, and finding a British IPA that didn't have a heavy American hop influence was a much more difficult task.</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">* </span><span style="font-size: large;">I could think of two that were widely known, but neither of them was available in Germany. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The other categories were much more difficult. </span><span style="font-size: large;">For brown ale, I had the choice of Newcastle Brown, which is insipid, and Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale. I don't promote Samuel Smith's beers, for ethical reasons. That left me with... nothing. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">As for Scotch ale? I was offered Belhaven Scottish Ale. I mean, yeah, but... wasn't there anything else in that style? No.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I've just searched for Scotch Ale on Beers of Europe. They stock one from Belgium, three from the US and just one from the UK. Brown ale is a more complicated category to define, but again, they stock quite a lot of Belgian brown ales (not quite the same thing) several American examples based on the British style and no British ones. </span><span style="font-size: large;">Beer Hawk currently lists no Scotch ales at all, several American brown ales, and a couple of British-brewed 'American-style' brown ales, but no English-style examples. It's a similar story across various other retailers. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I'm not saying no British brewers are brewing decent brown ales or Scotch ales any more. But I am saying these traditional styles are much harder to find than they used to be, and pretty much invisible compared to American-hopped IPA and pale ale, black IPA, Berlinerweiss, craft lager (or pale ale fraudulently labelled as lager), and experimental beers involving fruit. The same goes for barley wine, mild, old ale, and winter warmers. Again, Beers of Europe now lists an Austrian, a Belgian, a Norwegian and three American 'English-style barley wines' but no British examples. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Eventually, Sylvia and I had change the styles we presented. On my side, I had a golden ale, an American-style British IPA, a chocolate stout and Fuller's Vintage Ale. All great beers, but not the showcase of British styles we'd been hoping for.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This is not a post-Brexit 'British beer for British people' rant. I welcome the new styles and the innovations and adore the character of American hops. But as we face more beer choice than we've ever had before, it frustrates me that the British disease of 'what we do is always crap, if its from abroad it must be better' means that we're not innovating with styles developed here. You can't just argue that it's because those styles are boring or lack character, because as the above examples show, brewers in other countries, particularly the States, find them interesting and inspirational. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to have lunch with Charles Finkel, founder of the <a href="http://pikebrewing.com/" target="_blank">Pike Brewery in Seattle</a> and one of the original catalysts of what has now become the global craft beer movement. (If you don't already know him, <a href="http://pikebrewing.com/members/charles-finkel/" target="_blank">read this short biog</a>raphy, it's incredible.) As we sat down in his brewpub and he asked me what I'd like to drink, the core range gave me a rush of nostalgia for the time I first started writing about beer. It consists of a golden ale, an amber ale, a couple of IPAs, a Scotch ale, a Belgian-stye Tripel, and a stout. There's no fruit, no blurring of boundaries, no attempts to reinvent anything. And yet it's an exciting list that has something for everyone, a breadth of style and flavour it would take an awfully long time to get bored of. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">British beer styles were the direct inspiration for the American craft beer revolution. I find it sad that with nearly 2000 brewers in Britain now, there seems to be little enthusiasm for taking these native styles on and doing something interesting with them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Another point: most of the beer styles in Sylvia's original list are more reliant on malt for their character than hops. At a time when three new brewers a week open their doors, phone up hop merchants such as Charles Faram and then grumble darkly about not being able to get hold of any Citra or Galaxy hops because the entire supply was spoken for as soon as it was harvested last year (and no, not just by the macros, but also by the 150 new breweries that opened last year, and the year before that) and at a time when British brewers buy more US hops than British hops, and the collapse of the pound means those hops just got a lot more expensive even if you're lucky enough to find any, it beggars belief that brewers aren't exploring these older, maltier styles and applying their undoubted creativity to making them relevant again. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Before last week, the only time I'd visited Berlin was in 2004. Back then, Berlinerweisse was regarded as little more than a joke beer, sold from street kiosks and sweetened with a range of fruit syrups. It's now, I would argue, the most hip beer style on the global craft brewing scene. So why not mild next? Why not Scotch ale or barley wine?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">There are, of course, exceptions. Tonight I'm doing <a href="http://fivepointsbrewing.co.uk/events/" target="_blank">an event</a> at the <a href="http://www.harpcoventgarden.com/" target="_blank">Harp Pub</a> in Covent Garden with <a href="http://fivepointsbrewing.co.uk/" target="_blank">Five Points Brewing</a>, who are launching... a new brown ale! I haven't tasted it yet. Those who have say it's great, and that the traditional cask version is even better than the keg. Five Points is also the last brewery I can remember launching a new barley wine. They seem to be doing pretty well out of it. I imagine other brewers could too.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">*Before anyone jumps in, yes, I know nineteenth century IPAs were often brewed with US hops. I've seen some of the recipes. But they weren't <i>defined by</i> the fresh, zingy character of those hops like modern IPAs. </span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-88915448409024556742016-10-07T12:37:00.003+01:002016-10-07T12:39:05.454+01:00Apple Porn<b><i><span style="font-size: large;">The simple pleasures of tramping round an orchard.</span></i></b><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Autumn is a season of two halves. Both are definitely autumn, but one is summer's older sibling, looking back fondly, while the other is winter's harbinger. The change comes almost overnight some time late in October, just before the clocks go back. By this time we've all been remarking for several weeks that the nights are drawing in and it's getting a bit chilly, but then, around the 21st - which is, coincidentally (or not) now celebrated as Apple Day - the season finally shifts its weight to the other foot. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Before the change it's all about crisp blue skies with a chill at the edge, the leaves turning and sweaters coming out of the wardrobe. After, it's mud, rain, bare branches and those recently beautiful golds and yellows and browns clogging the drains and flying in your face. In short, Autumn Part One is a time to be outside. Part Two is the bit where you rediscover the joys of open fires, home baking and soup.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Every year, it's a panicked rush to make sure I enjoy Autumn Part One as much as I can. It's a very busy time of year with festivals, events and trade shows, and from early September to mid-October I'm invariably living out of suitcase most of the time. So when <a href="https://www.thatcherscider.co.uk/our-story/the-orchards/#nav" target="_blank">Thatcher's Cider</a> invited me down to Somerset for a walk in their orchards - with no other agenda than simply catching up with each other - I jumped at the chance. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Thatcher's has grown at an incredible rate in the last few years. Many locals still remember when it was a small cider farm, but now it's a national brand. Thatcher's Gold is pretty much a mainstream cider now, dismissed by purists but superior to the likes of Magner's, from which it seems to be soaking up a lot business. It doesn't appeal to me personally, but there are other ciders within the Thatcher's range that do, particularly the crisp, satisfying oak aged Vintage. The new special vintage blends of apple varieties, such as Tremletts and Falstaff, are also really interesting. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But for me, the most exciting thing Thatchers has done recently is to create a periodic table of the apples they use. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I can't really post a big enough picture of it here to do it justice, though you should hopefully be able to enlarge it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Apart from it being ridiculously clear and informative, and fascinating if you're an apple nerd like me, this is what the whole cider industry needs to be looking at. Good cider is made from apples. Obvious I know, but bad cider is made from cheap, imported apple concentrate of indeterminate origin. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Different apples have different characteristics, just like different grapes or hops. Wine became popular in the UK when people began to discover their favourite grape varieties. Craft beer exploded when people started to learn about different hops. It really doesn't take a genius to see apple varieties as the key building block for a stable, established premium quality cider market. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Martin Thatcher is genuinely fascinated by apples, after having spent his whole life around them. Walking around the massively expanded cider production facility at Myrtle Farm in the village of Sandford, he points to the house where he was born. "I've moved house six times in my life," he says, "And I think they're all within about 600 yards of each other." </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Between these houses there are over 500 acres of orchards. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Martin is currently experimenting with the effects of terroir. He's planting stands of the same apple varieties in different types of soil and monitoring the results, and is convinced the fruit will show significant differences.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">You can see where this hunch comes from down in the Exhibition Orchard. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Here there are 458 different cider apple varieties. When the Long Ashton Research Station's Pomology and Plant Breeding programme was disbanded in 1981, Martin's father John took cuttings from as many different trees as he could and grafted them onto rootstock in his own orchard. It's just as well he did: the Long Ashton orchards were bulldozed soon afterwards, and a library of old cider varieties could have been lost for ever.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Walking around the Exhibition Orchard in a brief but wonderful interval of clear blue skies, I'm compelled to take photos like some kind of apple ticker. My cider comrade <a href="http://billbradshaw.co.uk/">Bill Bradshaw</a> always says that when he was commissioned for a photography project about apples and cider making, he found he couldn't stop afterwards. I now see why. He's a professional photographer. I'm a bloke who can just about work out how to point a smartphone in the right direction. But the apple demands to be captured and recorded. It's the centre of still-life art. The artists who create Pomonas - the visual guides to apple varieties - obsess over capturing their beauty far more than they need to for simple identification purposes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">At various points, Martin stops and points to groups of trees bursting with life and fruit, and to others next to them, small and wizened, like the last kids to get picked when a school games lesson splits into two football teams. "These were planted at the same time, in the same soil, and given exactly the same watering, pruning and spraying regime," says Martin. "Look at the difference."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">If you're a grower, that's fascinating. But if you're a lucky tourist in the orchard at harvest time, you have eyes only for those that have decided this particular soil type, this precise elevation and position, is just right, and have shown their gratitude in the best way they know.</span><br />
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My new book <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-Orchard-Story-English-Fruit/dp/1846148839/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=PZAFE6JNS8ECEYZSTWP9" target="_blank">The Apple Orchard</a> is out now. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07x1mt5" target="_blank">This week's BBC Radio 4 Food Programme is about the book</a>, and is broadcast for the first time on Sunday 9th October at 12.32pm.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-74802154770711937332016-09-29T07:38:00.000+01:002016-09-29T07:38:06.708+01:00Say hello to The Apple Orchard<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">Part two of my <a href="http://petebrown.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/why-i-havent-been-blogging-much.html">Year of Writing Dangerously</a>...*</span></b></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Today my seventh book, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-Orchard-Story-English-Fruit/dp/1846148839/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=ZR7CR1GE1TXQRDJMA821">The Apple Orchard</a>, hits the shelves (hopefully. Please God let it hit at least some shelves.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">When I wrote <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Worlds-Best-Cider-Tradition-Somerset/dp/1906417997/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8">World's Best Cider</a></i> in 2013 with <a href="http://billbradshaw.co.uk/cider">Bill</a>, that book required the short, sharp, snappy sections typical of the guide book: 60 words on a cider here, 500 words on that cider maker there, 1000 words on the history, and so on. My books are normally long-form narrative, and I found much of my best writing was on the cutting room floor, so to speak, because it didn't really belong in the cider book. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">More importantly, the best stuff - or rather, the stuff that interested me the most at any rate - wasn't about cider at all, but about apples, the people who grow them, the places they're grown, and especially the history and mythology around them. Once we finished researching the cider book, I found myself missing orchards, and desperate to find a way to spend more time in them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">So I decided to write about apples themselves. Not just cider apples, but eating apples and dessert apples too. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I wanted to trace the history of what we believe to be a quintessentially English fruit through both our real and imagined past. Because I quickly realised that the apple is the the most symbolically laden of any fruit - indeed of any food. Across many different mythologies and religions, in popular culture and phraseology, the apple dominates. And it does so out of all proportion to its actual importance to our diet. Sure, we eat a lot of apples, but if symbolic importance was proportionate to dietary importance, the Beatles would have released their records on the Wheat label, and New York would be affectionately known as The Big Loaf.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I lost the whole summer of 2014 to the seemingly simple question of whether the Forbidden Fruit in the Bible was an apple or not. Genesis never specifies what the fruit was, but the Western World has believed it to be an apple since the Middle Ages. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pieter Paul Rubens' depiction of Eden and the Forbidden Fruit</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">And yet when Michelangelo painted the roof of the Sistine Chapel, he clearly depicted it as a fig. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLgLhlGnUPnRjjZEsIxE_hwmdh2yVSJfBQHdyhpsuOL7lggMGmCYIdifTTzDeqIbqT-TYBB-SB7YE8ps4dTX9yOuUp9mDvwWlv9-6YBWYvoFCjgVpGGAxwU8x_sTAQpKtXEMfDiw/s1600/48a8682322377888a204def5c05fcc0a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLgLhlGnUPnRjjZEsIxE_hwmdh2yVSJfBQHdyhpsuOL7lggMGmCYIdifTTzDeqIbqT-TYBB-SB7YE8ps4dTX9yOuUp9mDvwWlv9-6YBWYvoFCjgVpGGAxwU8x_sTAQpKtXEMfDiw/s640/48a8682322377888a204def5c05fcc0a.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Michelangelo's Forbidden... er, Fig</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">This could have been a whole book in itself - I read many on the subject. And they brought me, via the Middle East, South America, The Himalayas, the North Pole, the Happy Isles and the Moon, back round to the birth of modern horticulture.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I decided to follow the apple through the course of a year. It has its big showtimes at blossom in May and harvest in October, but as with anything in horticulture and agriculture, apple growing is a year-round activity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I learned how to graft and prune fruit trees. I picked apples in an orchard on the slopes of Glastonbury Tor, beneath which King Arthur sleeps, immortal thanks to the magical apples of Avalon.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbHyopSB4jHuboDHYjvUDHja2QmKEW_0fBt0LIATMdqaEkC9iBEl_Gt5K-q1FAoxrwlkXqM9h1g0DZzy5uMY4Y0d3gYzlUJKckkZh29rIQz202AUMsecEvZ7vCB1mhznAkkh2rvA/s1600/thumb_IMG_1057_1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbHyopSB4jHuboDHYjvUDHja2QmKEW_0fBt0LIATMdqaEkC9iBEl_Gt5K-q1FAoxrwlkXqM9h1g0DZzy5uMY4Y0d3gYzlUJKckkZh29rIQz202AUMsecEvZ7vCB1mhznAkkh2rvA/s640/thumb_IMG_1057_1024.jpg" width="480" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I also discovered, on my very first orchard visit with Bill, that I've developed a very serious allergy to eating apples. Thankfully whatever is causing the problem is left behind in the solid, or 'pomace,' when apples are pressed, because I can drink cider, and also, happily I discovered I can drink fresh apple juice. There are 4000 named varieties of apple cultivated in Britain, and a tasting of single variety juices revealed to me the astonishing array of flavours they possess.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The book ranges from myth to genetic modification, from wassail to the economics of the modern apple growing industry through meditations on soil. </span><span style="font-size: large;">It's a personal journey though the subject rather than an exhaustive history, but that's what my new editor at Penguin felt the book needed to be. We cut a lot of stuff out about mythology and history and how this supposedly English fruit was originally born in Kazakhstan, because the book would have been rambling and unfocused and 500 pages long if we'd left it in. But my journey through orchards still gives chance to touch on all these points. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Ha_nCJTJ4CKInNxoa8YZRh6GimRl70g41La_YMnQVmmJVgWvR9Q3iTCtmLoNMAwN0Mtq41_Aeb1cj91Rn08Ref4w3DG6_UcDDBtmKILOrd1AMOSkhO2tePCVN8L9k1JTe-0xrg/s1600/thumb_IMG_1033_1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Ha_nCJTJ4CKInNxoa8YZRh6GimRl70g41La_YMnQVmmJVgWvR9Q3iTCtmLoNMAwN0Mtq41_Aeb1cj91Rn08Ref4w3DG6_UcDDBtmKILOrd1AMOSkhO2tePCVN8L9k1JTe-0xrg/s640/thumb_IMG_1033_1024.jpg" width="480" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I wrote some more about all this stuff in <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/features/forbidden-fruit-at-the-core-of-the-human-story/">a piece for the <i>Daily Telegraph's</i> weekend section</a> last week. I'm going to be doing <a href="http://petebrown.blogspot.co.uk/p/events-diary.html">as many events as I can to promote the book</a> though the autumn - another excuse to get back into orchards and near trees. (Now, I have a physical response to entering an orchard. I can feel my heart rate slow, my breathing deepen, my mind settle.) </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I'm delighted to be recording an edition of BBC Radio 4's <i>Food Programme</i> about the book next week, which is provisionally slated for broadcast on Sunday 9th October. (More details to follow when confirmed.) And I'm doubly delighted that BBC Radio 4 have also picked up <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-Orchard-Story-English-Fruit/dp/1846148839/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=KY4CB94NQHMMRZA83D86">The Apple Orchard</a> as Book of the Week, to be read out every morning w/c 5th December. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I'm nervous about this, my first book that has no link at all to beer or pubs (although cider is made and consumed in the later chapters). I hope that even if you've never really thought that much about apples - as I hadn't until I first entered an orchard with a notebook in my hand - you'll find this fascinating and diverting. The apple is a complicated, mysterious treasure hiding in plain sight and trying to look boring, and its history shines a different light on the history of humanity, and what we believe in.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVX1NUskieU1onQjVN52UybXcwuM2aZN6tjotxRjoNoVBz0J-ez6dxGouFr_wpoJkFTtlQWEE8xPLl-71XzMe9bYQgdJySqd_5HZ1aS3SRUJQBT1tVVhRFa9pSL-jVU0z_sh6JVw/s1600/IMG_0147.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="459" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVX1NUskieU1onQjVN52UybXcwuM2aZN6tjotxRjoNoVBz0J-ez6dxGouFr_wpoJkFTtlQWEE8xPLl-71XzMe9bYQgdJySqd_5HZ1aS3SRUJQBT1tVVhRFa9pSL-jVU0z_sh6JVw/s640/IMG_0147.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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The photos in this blog were taken by me primarily as <i>aides memoire</i> while I was writing. the book is not illustrated. </div>
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* The first of the three books I very stupidly signed up to write simultaneously was <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pub-Cultural-Institution-Country-Corner/dp/1910254525/ref=pd_sim_sbs_14_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=0EGWV3B6BRQD8EJT6GDM">The Pub: A Cultural Institution</a></i>, which was published in mid-August 2016. The third and final book is my journey through the nature of beer - an exploration of hops, barley, yeast and water. I submitted a complete first draft of this to my publisher two weeks ago. This is the one through <a href="https://unbound.com/" target="_blank">Unbound</a>, which uses rewards-based crowdfunding to cover publication costs before publishing books in the usual manner. The book is due out in May/June 2017, but subscribers will get their copes as soon as it's back from the printers, which will probably be a couple of months earlier. Even though the book is fully funded, if you want to get a copy of it before publication as well as other rewards, you can still subscribe <a href="https://unbound.com/books/what-are-you-drinking" target="_blank">here</a>. </div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-25601797857772531252016-08-09T10:17:00.001+01:002016-08-09T10:17:44.495+01:00The Pub: A Cultural Institution<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The first of three new books from me is out now. Sort of.<br />
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My book on pubs is officially released on 18 August, but it's already been spotted in Foyles and Blackwells.<br />
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I was asked to do this book by the publisher - it was a scenario where they came up with the idea and had a shortlist of authors in mind for it. If I'd said no, they would have asked someone else. But I couldn't say no.<br />
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We all know the format of this kind of 'coffee table' book. It looks beautiful. It's not the kind of book you read from cover to cover. You pick it up and flip through it, lingering over the pictures. In some, the text is just there to put gaps between the pictures.<br />
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Like <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Worlds-Best-Cider-Tradition-Somerset/dp/1906417997/ref=la_B001PH3AN6_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1470667630&sr=1-5">my and Bill's book on cider</a>, I wanted to make this book more than that. It had to be beautiful, it had to be a book you want to buy as a present for anyone who loves pubs. But I also wanted the text to mean something, for it also to be a book you did want to read cover to cover.<br />
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So it's not a book that reviews pubs by the range of beers they have, what the food is like or whether they allow dogs. The internet is a far better place for that. The centre of this book for me are the fifty double page spread reviews of my favourite pubs.<br />
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It's seventy years ago this year since George Orwell wrote <a href="http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-moon-under-water/">The Moon Under Water</a> and said that the single thing that defines a great pub is its atmosphere. So I set myself the task of trying to review pubs by their atmosphere. It's a difficult task, because atmosphere is intangible, which is why few pub reviewers talk about what remains the single most important criterion by which we judge pubs. </div>
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I certainly didn't succeed in reviewing every pub by its atmosphere - some of the reviews lapse into talking about history, location or beer range, although all these factors do contribute to atmosphere. But where I have succeeded, the reviews are short essays on what makes pubs pubs, little stories that pick up on and celebrate the legendary landlord, the role in the community, the eccentricities and legends that separate great pubs from other retail outlets.<br />
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As well as these top fifty, there are shorter listings of a further 250 pubs all across the UK, plus sections on pub history and pub culture. It's pub porn, basically. Researching the book last year was an absolute delight. Sometimes we spent all day driving to a particular pub that had been recommended, and we'd get there and it would be worth every minute of the journey. It was brilliant going to places like Liverpool, having tweeted that I'd be there, and finding a posse of people waiting for me so they could show me their favourite haunts. Five days with a list of recommendations across Somerset, Devon and Cornwall was utterly magical, and the comedown at the end, when we visited pub that was merely good as opposed to legendary, was startling.<br />
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There's a lot of doom and gloom talked about pubs at the moment, with good reason. For the last decade pubs have been put through the wringer. This book doesn't address that - it seeks to remind the reader why pubs matter so much in the first place.<br />
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The book is a<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pub-Cultural-Institution-Country-Corner/dp/1910254525/ref=la_B001PH3AN6_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1470667630&sr=1-1">vailable for pre-order on Amazon</a> and I imagine they'll be shipping in the next couple off days. If you're at the Great British Beer Festival today, I'm signing copies - unofficially - at the CAMRA bookstall at 3pm and 6pm.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-10595016979105079712016-08-05T07:11:00.002+01:002016-08-05T07:11:56.281+01:00Stop the presses: the definition of craft beerYet again, I'm in the middle of writing a piece that addresses the idea that craft beer is 'a meaningless term,' that 'craft beer' doesn't exist because it had no precise, technical definition.<br />
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To argue the point I'm making, I hauled out my massive copy of the <i>Oxford English Dictionary</i> to look at the definition of the word 'craft.' And lo and behold, just below the three different definitions of 'craft', the next entry is 'craft beer'!<br />
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So according to the OED:<br />
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<b>'craft beer</b> (also <b>craft brew</b>) <b>noun</b> (US) a beer with a distinctive flavour, produced and distributed in a particular region.'<br />
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I kinda like that. You may not. I think it gets to the point of what it's all about. You may disagree with it, you may think it's incomplete, you may think it misses the point. I really don't care. Because craft beer has a strict tight, pithy definition, created by the people whose job it is to define what words mean. This is the definition of craft beer whether you like it or not. If you disagree, you might as well argue with the definitions of the words 'cramp,' 'cranial,' 'crannog' or 'crap hat.'<br />
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This may not solve many of the issues in craft beer, but it does hopefully mean an end to the fatuous argument that the problem with craft beer is its lack of a strict definition. If you have a problem with craft beer, it's probably not about the definition of the word, but about what you feeling being done to the concept.<br />
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By the way, my personal big-ass copy of the <i>Oxford English Dictionary </i>was published in 2003, so (a) apologies to anyone for whom this is old news and (b) that means craft beer has had a definition all this time we've been arguing over whether it does to not. Tchoh!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-84981931669249863682016-08-02T08:01:00.000+01:002016-08-02T08:01:12.160+01:00Long Read: Burton IPA's arrival in India.<b><i>The reason I'm not blogging at the moment is that I'm deep into writing up my next beer book, </i>What Are You Drinking?<i> I'm hoping to finish this draft in the next two weeks, and it'll be published spring next year. </i></b><br />
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<b><i>I'm going through the four key raw materials of beer and telling their stories, and I'm currently up to water. It's the toughest one to do. </i></b><b><i>Today, after writing about Dublin and Bohemia, I'm writing about the special water that made Burton on Trent the ale brewing capital of the world, and I've gone back into my first draft of </i>Hops and Glory<i> for help. That first draft was 50 per cent longer than the book that was eventually published. I remember my editor reading it and saying, "Look, I'm enjoying it OK? But I'm expecting to read about a sea voyage to India and all I'm saying is I'm on page 156 and I'm still on a canal boat outside Burton." </i></b><i><b>My first attempt at editing it resulted in it being 5000 longer. </b></i><br />
<i><b><br /></b></i>
<i><b>We had to be brutal. A lot of the granular history of Burton and IPA got cut, whole chapters summarised into a few lines each. I've sometimes regretted this because while many people tell me they enjoy the book, it doesn't get mentioned in the canon of historical research on IPA very often. It was aimed at a general audience rather than a beer geek or brewer, and some of the stuff serious beer heads might find fascinating really slowed the pace down for everyone else.</b></i><br />
<i><b><br /></b></i>
<i><b>So this morning, I've dug out the first draft hoping to find a previously unpublished treatise on the properties of Burton water and its suitability for brewing strong pale ale. It's not quite there, and I've misremembered what a lot of the research actually told me. But I did find this, and I found it fascinating. If you're a hardcore IPA nut, you might find it interesting too. Long-read blog posts seem to be in fashion at the moment, and this makes up for me not writing </b></i><b><i>anything else here, and there's no other way I can use it, so why not? If you don't fancy spending 20 minutes reading detailed beer history, you can leave now and I'll come back to proper blogging as soon as I can.</i></b><br />
<i><b><br /></b></i>
<i><b>The following passage was cut down to about half this length in the book, and loses many of the primary quotes, which get summarised But in full, it tells the story of what happened when Burton IPA first arrived in India. In writing the book, I didn't just want to get an accurate handle on what the beer was really like; I wanted to know why. What made it work in India? Why did it take off? Why did the British in India drink it? How was it served? What did they think of it?</b></i><br />
<i><b><br /></b></i>
<i><b>So here we are. To set the scene: The London brewer Hodgson's owns the beer market in India. He has good links with the East India Company's sea captains and they make a lot of money by transporting and selling his beers. But Hodgson gets greedy and tries to hike prices, flooding the market with cheap beer whenever a competitor appears, then whacking them up again when the competitor backs off. Campbell Marjoribanks of the East India Company visits Samuel Allsopp in Burton and suggests that he might like a crack at the Indian market. He gives Allsopp a sample of Hodgson's beer and Allsopp brews a version of it in Burton, unaware that the difference in brewing water compared to London (see?) will make it a dramatically different beer. But will its superior quality be enough to counter Hodgson's sharp marketing practices? He places his first brew on two ships sailing from Liverpool: the Bencoolen and the Seaforth. They're also carrying some of Hodgson's beer. Six months later, they arrive at the dock in Calcutta...</b></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Given the Bencoolen factory’s historic
reputation as a disease-blown, drink-sodden, last chance saloon that convicts
would rather hang than be posted to, and its censure by 'John Company' over its
enthusiasm for Burton ale, it’s perhaps fitting that Samuel Allsopp’s first consignment
of strong beer for India went on a ship of the same name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But much had changed in the century since the
Bencoolen public table’s legendary binge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Affairs in the east were more organised, more <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">civilised</i> now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beer was a
respectable drink, a sign of good standing, drunk by people who were creating a
New England that was different from home in only a few key respects: it was
much hotter, a bit more dangerous, and they were able to live like lords rather
than clerks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But an exotic world still lay outside the
window.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fanny Parkes, arriving only a
few months earlier, painted a vivid picture of the sight that would have
greeted the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bencoolen</i> as she made her
final passage up the Hugli River: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Passing through the different vessels that crowd the Hoogly
off Calcutta gave me great pleasure; the fine merchant-ships, the gay,
well-trimmed American vessels, the grotesque forms of the Arab ships, the
Chinese vessels with an eye on each side the bows to enable the vessel to see
her way across the deep waters, the native vessels in all their fanciful and
picturesque forms, the pleasure-boats of private gentlemen, the beautiful
private residences in Chowringhee, the Government-house, the crowds of people
and vehicles of all descriptions, both European and Asiatic, form a scene of
beauty of which I know not the equal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A further key difference is that here,
beer was still a luxury rather than the centuries-old staple it was back
home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The market Hodgson’s dominated was
not huge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John Bell, who compiled trade
figures for the Bengal authorities, estimated the average annual consumption of
beer at almost seven thousand hogsheads, a quarter of which went to Madras, the
rest to Bengal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘There is reason to
suppose that the demand would increase if the price was steady’, he wrote, ‘but
while it fluctuates from six to fifteen rupees a dozen it is not likely that
the consumption will be increased’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On
the contrary, ‘thousands would be compelled to give it up and take to drinking
French clarets, which are and have been selling at from three to eighteen
rupees a dozen’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>French clarets?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Less than a decade after Waterloo?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, we couldn’t have that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The supply of affordable beer had to be
stabilised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The fact that pale ale occupied a very
similar price range to French claret speaks volumes about the quality of the
beer and the demand for it in this climate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That quality was strictly upheld by the import agents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some historians wax dramatically about how
rejected beer was poured away into the harbour.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This did sometimes happen – WH Roberts heard from a correspondent in
1845 of 80 hogsheads being poured away – but it would have had to have been
incredibly bad beer to warrant such measures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Calcutta Gazette</i> carried
plenty of ads such as the one in April 1809 for ‘62 hogsheads of REJECTED BEER,
bearing different Marks, imported on the Honourable Company’s ship General
Stuart.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even broached casks – with beer
that could only have been stale – were sold for anything they could get: ‘8
full and one ullaged Hogsheads of Damaged Beer imported on the Honourable
Company ship Tottenham’ were sold by Captain Hughes once permission had been
given by the customs collectors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Because even beer that couldn’t pass
muster had its uses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It might have
molasses pitched in, the sugar giving it an additional fermentation, then be
watered down and mixed with spices to disguise the rank taste.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If it was too bad even for that, it could be
used to form the base of ketchup: one of the first recipes for ‘catsup’ was
devised by Hannah Glasse in 1747 ‘for the Captains of ships’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It could keep for up to twenty years, and
consisted of stale beer, anchovies, mace, cloves, pepper, ginger and
mushrooms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But there was to be no Samuel Allsopp’s
ketchup after the tasters had done their work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Burton pale ale was approved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The cargo went to the city’s auction houses, and the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Calcutta Gazette</i> filled up with beer
ads.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hodgson was clearly at the
swamp-the-market phase in his protectionist cycle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He must have got wind of Allsopp’s intentions,
because eleven and a half thousand hogsheads of beer were imported in the
1822-23 season, double the amount of year before, four times the amount the
year before that, and double anything that would be achieved for the rest of
the decade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ads in the paper became
increasingly lyrical in their praise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
April the front page boasted ‘prime picked’ Hodgson’s pale ale, which
‘surpasses in superiority of quality, any of the former season’s... as fine
Malt Liquor as ever was drunk’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The price of ale plummeted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hodgson’s beer was selling for twenty-five
rupees per hogshead – the price of Allsopp’s ale was set at twenty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a good start, but it wasn’t great –
twenty rupees a hogshead when in some years you could get fifteen for a dozen
quart bottles was not the basis for a profitable business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John Bell wasn’t happy: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The enhanced scale of importation which took place in
1822-23 was both unwise, and attended with great loss to those immediately
concerned with the trial of monopolizing the Indian market; and the sorrowful
winding up of that speculation, by forced sales of unsound beer... evinced a
want of proper discrimination on the part of those whose time would have been
more properly and advantageously employed in the immediate exercise of their calling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Allsopp’s second consignment fared
better, helped by a fortunate bit of circumstance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the second ship, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Seaforth</i>, came in, Tulloh & Co as
usual offered ‘the finest stock of HODGSON’S ripe PALE ALE to be met with in
India’, but further down the page sat the following notice:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">REJECTED BEER<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">To be sold by Public Auction, by Messrs Taylor & Co, on
the CUSTOM HOUSE WHARF, by permission of the Collector of Sea Customs, at
eleven o’ Clock precisely, on Saturday next, the 28<sup>th</sup> Instant, 48
HOGSHEADS of Hodgson’s BEER, and 17 empty HOGSHEADS, landed from the ship
Timandra, and 30 hogsheads of Hodgson’s BEER, landed from the ship Seaforth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A good portion of Hodgson’s beer had
spoiled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Allsopp’s beer, on the same
ship, had not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This time, it fetched
forty rupees at auction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">With a journey of up to six months each
way, brewers in England had to wait for up to a year to learn how their
business had gone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But slowly, the
letters began to arrive back in Burton.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Mr Gisborne, a customer of the first order, wrote to Allsopp in July
1823 asking if the trade in Burton ale could be expanded, recommending that he
be given the authority to bottle the ale for retail on arrival.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In November 1824, Mr J C Bailton wrote from
Calcutta:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">I have watched the whole progress of your ale… With
reference to the loss you have sustained in your first shipments, you must have
been prepared for that, had you known<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>that market as well as I do; here almost everything is name, and
Hodgson’s has so long stood without a rival, that it was a matter of
astonishment how your ale could have stood in competition; but that it did is a
fact, and I myself was present when a butt of yours fetched 136 rupees, and a
butt of Hodgson’s only 80 rupees at public sale. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Captain Chapman wrote that the ale had
turned out well, that a bigger shipment should be sent the following year, and
that even then it might be scarce.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
the same month, Messrs Gordon & Co. wrote:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">After bottling off a portion, which was approved by our
friends, the demand for this article has since been very great, and we now have
orders to some extent for this ale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
would, therefore, strenuously recommend Mr Allsopp to make further consignments
of it; and we have every reason to believe he will have a fair competition with
Messrs Hodgson & Co.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The trickle of orders coming in via
agents in Liverpool and London turned into a steady stream.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1824 Allsopp sent out two thousand
barrels, and in October 1825, Captain Probyn wrote that large numbers of his
passengers preferred Allsopp’s to Hodgson’s ale, and that ‘many who had been
long in India, declared it to be preferable to any they had ever tasted in the
East’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Calcutta Weekly Price Current</i> of November 1826, the following entry
occurs:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Rupees<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">ALE – <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Hodgson, per
Hogshead <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>170<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Allsopp’s
Burton<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>”<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>170<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">No other beer is quoted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Calcutta Gazette</i>, the auction houses were advertising ‘a fresh
importation of Allsopp’s Highly Admired Pale Burton Ale’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Messrs Tulloh & Co, for so long in the
grip of Hodgson, (it was they who would go on to write the highly critical <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Circular on the Beer Trade of India</i>) had
much pleasure in announcing to the public that they had available a small batch
of ‘ALLSOPP’S FAMOUS PALE ALE... Great attention was bestowed on the brewing of
this batch, and is it has come out in the short period of 105 days from
Liverpool, there is every reason to expect it will turn out as almost all
Allsopp’s Shipments have done, in excellent order’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They still sold Hodgson’s beer of course, but
now there was a worthy rival the copy for Hodgson's seemed a little less effusive: ‘it will be carefully examined by Messrs
Watson & Co and none passed but such as is pronounced to be decidedly of
the very best quality’, they reassured us, and while it was still ‘the finest
beer that comes to the Indian market’, this was only ‘as far as the general
taste goes’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Tizard put it, ‘the
spell had been broken’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In four seasons,
Allsopp had shattered Hodgson’s grip on the market. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the face of seemingly insurmountable
odds, there was something about Allsopp’s beer that was powerful enough to
supplant the established, dominant market leader who seemingly held all the
cards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course some of this success
was due to the vision and determination of Allsopp himself, a man who ‘saw no difficulties
which time, perseverance, resolution, consistency, and steady, unswerving
honour could not overcome’.<span style="font-size: 15px;"> </span>But there was more to it than that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What Campbell Marjoribanks couldn’t have
realised when he decided to court Allsopp is that he was approaching a brewer
who possessed a very special ingredient.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Trent Valley is a broad trough carved
out of ancient rock, covered with a layer of sand and gravel anywhere up to
sixty feet deep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rain water trickles
through these beds for tens of thousands of years, and as a result, by the time
it emerges from wells and springs it contains a unique composition of minerals
that makes it not only superior to soft, southern water from London, but the
best water for ale brewing found anywhere in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has a higher sulphate content than any
other major brewing centre, giving a dry, bitter flavour to beer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sulphate means brewers can add large amounts
of hops to the beer without it becoming too astringently bitter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Brewing scientists also claim that water for
ale should be high in calcium – Burton has the highest calcium content of any
major brewing region.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It should be high
in magnesium <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and low in sodium and
bicarbonate – once more, Burton water is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The strong, hoppy beer devised by Hodgson was given a whole new
dimension when brewed in Burton.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was
a phenomenal stroke of good fortune, bringing a style of beer that suited the
Indian climate to a place that would never have had good reason to brew it, but
was, in the words of one later Bass historian, ‘The one spot in the world where
the well-water is so obviously intended by Nature for kindly union with those
fruits of the earth, to give beer incomparable’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In 1828 a senior partner at George’s, a
porter brewery in Bristol that had decided to experiement with pale ale,
suggested that Hodgson’s beer simply didn’t match up to the new brews from
Burton.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Writing to Willis & Earle in
Calcutta, he said of Hodgson’s ale, ‘We neither like its thick and muddy appearance
or rank bitter flavour’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two years later,
when George’s joined the golden beer rush to Calcutta, the same partner
explained, ‘We made a slight alteration to the Ale by brewing it rather of a
paler colour and more hop’d to make it as similar as possible to some samples
of Allsopp’s ale’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Even if Hodgson’s recipe was recreated
exactly in Burton, with the only difference being Burton instead of London
water, the Burton version would have been superior in quality and character
when it reached India.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And Hodgson was
simply his own worst enemy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Having
already pissed off the East India Company to such an extent that one of its
directors went out of his way to find someone capable of putting up a fight,
Hodgson, surely expecting to rout Allsopp from the market, changed his terms of
business in 1824 and shut out the very people he relied on to get his beer to
India. According to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Circular on the
Beer Trade in India,</i> the captains and officers of the East Indiamen had
been Hodgson’s best customers thanks largely to the generous credit terms he
extended to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hodgson’s ale was ‘one
of the principal articles in their investments’ until, in 1824, he not only
raised his prices to them, but refused now to sell on any terms except for hard
cash:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Hodgson & Co., confident of the power they had over the
market, sent the Beer out for sale on their own account; thus they, in a short
time, became Brewers. Shippers, Merchants, and even retailers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These proceedings naturally and justly
excited hostile feelings in those engaged in the Indian Trade at home; while
the public here, seeing at last the complete control which Hodgson endeavoured
to maintain over the market, turned their faces against him, and gave
encouragement to other Brewers who fortunately sent out excellent beer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">That ‘encouragement’ took many
forms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Happy customers were eager to
advise Allsopp not just on how to brew his beer, but when the best time was to
send it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then as now, one of the things
that mattered most was that the beer was served cool, which wasn’t easy when
the temperature rarely dipped below thirty degrees C and refrigeration wasn’t
going to appear for another fifty years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Happily, one of India’s main manufactures provided the answer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1828, when young Henry Allsopp was working
for Gladstone & Co, a Liverpool shipping agent, he received a letter for a
Mr Lyon in Calcutta:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-no-proof: yes;">I would advise your father to ship his Beer
in the month of November or latter end of October, to arrive here in March or
April; it is then our hottest season, and the quantity of Beer then consumed is
tremendous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your Beer is certainly a
most delightful beverage during the hot season; it is always cooled with
saltpetre before it is drank; we can make it by this article as cold as ice. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">‘F.E.W.’ reminisced in a newspaper
article years later that ‘beer was always deliciously cooled with saltpetre,
when everything else was lukewarm; a point very much in its favour’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A bottle or flask of ale would be
immersed in a solution of saltpetre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Water was added, and as it mixed with the saltpetre it would cool within
a few minutes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was an effective
method but fiddly and expensive, especially given that a more lucrative use of
saltpetre was in the manufacture of gunpowder, which the Company still needed
even more than cold beer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Gradually, an even more ingenious cooling
method came into use.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bottles were hung
outdoors, inside a cage or cradle, and covered with a wet cloth, the edges of
which sat in a trough of water at the bottom of the cage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The hot wind evaporated the water, and the
evaporation cooled the water.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The cloths
sucked up more water, creating a continuous cooling process.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Michael Bass soon noticed what was
happening over at Allsopp’s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d
already experimented with pale malts a few years previously, and now, shut out
of the Baltic trade by Benjamin Wilson twenty years before, it was time for his
revenge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Forced to turn back to the
domestic market after the Baltic fiasco, Bass had built far better trading
links with important cities such as Liverpool, London and Manchester.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, his network was more developed than
Allsopp’s, and he knew the canals better.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>From 1823 there was a sharp increase in Bass sales to London
agents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By 1828 41 per cent of Bass’
output was going to London and Liverpool, much of it in large consignments for
export.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1828 the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Calcutta Gazette</i> was advertising ‘Hodgson’s Allsopp’s and Basse’s
Beer in wood, and in bottle, of different ages, some all perfection, others
approaching it’, and most auction houses continued to promote all three brands
over the next few years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1832 Bass
exported 5193 barrels to Calcutta – slightly more than Hodgson and Allsopp’s
combined shipments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although Michel Bass
didn’t live to see it (he died in 1827, leaving the brewery to his son, Michael
Thomas) his victory over Allsopp’s was decisive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The two would remain rivals for another
century, each far bigger than any other Burton brewer, but Allsopp would never
again quite challenge Bass’ supremacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In 1835 John Bell noted that the beer
trade had fallen off again, and that ‘the most remarkable deficiency is in
supplies from Hodgson; on the other hand, Bass and Allsopp have shipped more
extensively.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A year later, he could
barely keep the triumph felt by Bengal’s populace from his remarks:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Beer is an article subject to the vicissitude of caprice
more than any other article perhaps imported into Calcutta.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A very few years ago Hodgson stood alone in
the market, and the idea of rivalry was never entertained.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus he was enabled to reach his own terms –
cash – without any guarantee as to quality; and success, for some time, gained
for him a name and wealth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">People in England and India, at length began to discover,
that the magic spell might be broken by the strong hand of competition; and
although some of those who first had temerity enough to enter the field against
so formidable an antagonist, supported as he was by the strongest prejudice,
suffered severely, Hodgson was at length defeated, and the market is now
supplied by a variety of brewers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Tizard was happy to advise this ‘variety
of brewers’ on how to prosper in India:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The first point of consideration is Quality... The ale
adapted for this market should be a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">clear-light-bitter-pale</i>
ale of a moderate strength, and by no means what is termed in Calcutta heady;
it should be shipped in hogsheads which, we need scarcely observe, should be
most carefully coopered... Another point is, that by frequent consignments, you
acquire <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a name</i>, which, as you may be
aware, is everything in India.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">While it would be a long time before the
word was used freely in commerce, in order to succeed, these beers had to be
strong <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">brands</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was Hodgson’s legacy: his name became
synonymous with quality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To beat him,
you had to beat him not only on quality, but also on sheer brand
awareness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s no coincidence that,
fifty years after establishing itself in India, Bass would become the UK’s
first registered trade mark.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As well as the triumvirate of Bass,
Allsopp, and to an increasingly lesser extent, Hodgson, by 1833 brewers such as
Ind and Smith, Worthington, Charrington and Barclay Perkins of London and
Tennent of Glasgow were sending pale ale to India.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By 1837 Bell notes the arrival of beer from
the United States and ‘Cape Beer’, but these were to make up a tiny amount of
the beer drunk in India – as Tizard states, it was ‘clear that England must
furnish the supply’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Imports doubled through the 1830s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The competition and regularity of supply
stabilised prices, allowing the taste for beer to spread throughout
Anglo-Indian society, right through to ‘the poorer classes of British
inhabitants, which having once acquired, they will continue to indulge as long
as prices remain moderate’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Allsopp’s
‘Burton India Ale’ lost out to Bass in sales, but was still considered by many,
including Tizard, to be ‘the most salable’, thanks mainly to its ‘superior
lightness and brilliancy’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Soon,
according to Bell, ‘no less than twenty brewers now send out Beer from England,
where one occupied the field a very few years ago’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Beer now quickly supplanted other drinks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sales of Madeira collapsed from 85204 rupees
in 1829-30 to 21632 rupees in 1833-34, with Bell observing that ‘this
once-favoured wine stands... as an example of the effects produced on trade by
the caprice of fashion... the sudden distaste for Madeira would almost lead us
to believe that some magic influence had been at work’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The consumption of spirits was ‘certainly not
so great as formerly’, port was ‘limited’ and other drinks such as champagne
and hock had ‘never been very great’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
for the over-supply of Claret, ‘we hope that the French have at last seen the
folly of driving such a ruinous trade’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-no-proof: yes;">As Bushnan remarked in
1853, thanks to the many fine qualities of Samuel Allsopp:</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-no-proof: yes;">Since the year 1824 no Englishman has been
reduced to the sad necessity of drinking French claret for the want of a
draught of good, sound, wholesome, and refreshing English Burton beer.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-150258893617384302016-05-31T14:00:00.002+01:002016-05-31T20:53:20.261+01:00Why don't you switch off your smartphone and go out and do something less boring instead?... such as coming to one of my summer festival events?<br />
<br />
This weekend it's the <a href="http://www.stokenewingtonliteraryfestival.com/">Stoke Newington Literary Festival</a>. Set up by my wife Liz in 2010, it's now become recognised as one of the coolest small festivals in the UK, thanks to a combination of it being a nice place with some lovely venues to sit and listen and talk about books, having an excellent audience, amazing volunteers, and Liz's boundless enthusiasm and extraordinary knack for programming events. Even if I had nothing to do with it you should still come if you can, for legendary novelists, celebrations of Punk's 40th birthday, a little bit of politics, some food, drink and superb comedy.<br />
<br />
But I also happen to be doing a couple of events too.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjartKl9KDMOx16QhnqyrtNIAjBVC6q9kxWdbce4hkMF1wcGBJcV4pDXQm4Vp75rz9VXiY5vbg-NDpKK3K6PTwC4xhJ2Uuj_r9idAyYmBb3kbE5ELb8sJvwLNbMspGaFs6ZoNiH8A/s1600/CjzBdSGUoAESw0_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjartKl9KDMOx16QhnqyrtNIAjBVC6q9kxWdbce4hkMF1wcGBJcV4pDXQm4Vp75rz9VXiY5vbg-NDpKK3K6PTwC4xhJ2Uuj_r9idAyYmBb3kbE5ELb8sJvwLNbMspGaFs6ZoNiH8A/s400/CjzBdSGUoAESw0_.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Amended from the original after I first posted it. Thanks, Tom Stainer!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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On Saturday at 6pm I'll be welcoming four of London's best breweries to chat beer in Stoke Newington Town Hall. Is London's brewery boom showing the first signs of slowing down? Are we getting bored of Citra hops yet? Is our love affair with craft beer turning sour? Or are we set for an ever-expanding beery universe after London brewing's 2010 Big Bang? Such questions can only be answered with a beer in hand, so <a href="http://www.redemptionbrewing.co.uk/">Redemption</a> (who have sponsored Stokey Litfest since its inception) <a href="http://www.londonbrewing.com/">London Brewing Co</a> (who are helping us run the festival bars this year) <a href="https://www.facebook.com/40ftbrewery/">40FT</a> (who are possibly the closest brewery now the Stoke Newington) and <a href="http://www.brewbynumbers.com/">Brewed by Numbers</a> (who are currently making my favourite London beers) will each be bringing one of their beers along for you to taste while they share their thoughts. We did a similar event at Stokey Litfest three years ago. It sold out, and people are still talking about it. <a href="http://www.stokenewingtonliteraryfestival.com/snlf_events/londons-brewing-with-pete-brown/">Tickets for London's Brewing are £5 and available here</a>, and include four beer samples. It's the best deal you'll get on London craft beer anywhere this weekend.<br />
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The festival bars will feature loads of great beers and ciders, and not o be missed is the marquee outside the town hall, sponsored by our lead beer partner Budvar. The Czech brewery will be bringing their new krausened beer as well as the original Budvar, and the tent will feature performances by bands, poets and musicians across the weekend including the phenomenal Andy Diagram (ex-James) doing things with a trumpet that will blow your mind - here he was at the festival two years ago:<br />
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and the legendary Edward Tudor Pole out of Crystal Maze and Tenpole Tudor (suit of armour probably not included this time).<br />
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If I can tear myself away from that, I'm doing a second event on Sunday. My friend and fellow N16 author Travis Elborough has written <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/30/walk-in-park-life-and-times-of-peoples-insitution-travis-elborough-review">a fine book about the role of parks in shaping, enhancing and defining our communities</a>, and we thought pubs - the other great people's institution - had a lot in common with that, and <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pub-Cultural-Institution-Country-Corner/dp/1910254525/ref=pd_sim_sbs_14_1?ie=UTF8&dpID=516AKzPDtkL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR138%2C160_&refRID=S3HYH1WM2E7NHH4TA8N6">I have a new book on pubs coming out in the summer</a>. The affable and engaging Mark Mason's <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3278603/How-ferret-helped-Charles-Di-s-wedding-TV-Love-pointless-trivia-new-book-Britain-s-124-postcode-areas-right-street.html">new book looks at Britain by postcode</a>, and how they shape the way we think of an area. The three of us had a chat on stage at the festival three years ago and everyone wanted it to carry on in the beer tent afterwards, so we're all back with our new books this year to pick up where we left off. According to the official programme, we're Stokey's literary boy band. Terrifying. <a href="http://www.stokenewingtonliteraryfestival.com/snlf_events/pubs-parks-postcodes/">Tickets for Pubs, Parks and Postcodes are £4 and are available here.</a><br />
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Later in June, I'm ridiculously excited to be making my gigging venue at the <a href="http://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/">Glastonbury Festival.</a> At 3pm on the Friday, I'll be talking apples and tors, orchards and Celtic myth, and about how ridiculously excited I am to get to see Phillip Glass's Heroes Symphony live. If you're lucky enough to have got s ticket to Glasto this year, try to find me at the Free University of Glastonbury Stage. <br />
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A couple of days after that I'm getting on a plane to South Africa! <a href="http://beerbootcamp.weebly.com/">Beer Boot Camp </a>is a one day conference with a difference - it goes on tour! I'll be chatting beer ingredients and my forthcoming book to brewers and beer enthusiasts in Jo'burg in the 2nd and Cape Town on the 9th. More information and tickets <a href="http://beerbootcamp.weebly.com/">here</a>.</div>
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And finally for now, I'll be at the <a href="http://www.greenman.net/">Green Man Festival</a> from 18th to 21st August. My beer and music matching at Green Man has turned into a regular gig and one of my favourite events of the year. With 100 beers and ciders in the beer tent and a wonderfully eclectic line-up across the stages, I'll be kicking off Green Man 2016 at noon on Friday by pairing the beers and performers of the festival. we had over a thousand people packed into the literary tent last year for this so if you are going to Green Man, get there early to get a seat!</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-34416815896036108752016-04-23T10:40:00.000+01:002016-04-23T10:40:06.805+01:00Shakespeare's Real Local?<i><b>A tantalising new scrap of evidence about the bard's drinking habits has emerged.</b></i><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Tabard Inn, Borough High Street</td></tr>
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When I wrote <i><a href="http://petebrown.blogspot.be/p/shakespeares-local-six-centuries-of.html">Shakespeare's Local</a></i> I upset some readers because I failed to prove the contention in the title of the book - that William Shakespeare drank in the George Inn in Borough High Street.<br />
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At a time when most people were illiterate, very little got written down. Information about Shakespeare's life is so scant there's not even really any evidence of where he lived when he was in London, let alone where he enjoyed a pint. When I wrote the book, there was not one single mention of Shakespeare ever having been recorded as being in any pub, ever.<br />
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And yet we know he <i>did</i> live in London for many years, even if we don't know exactly where. And we know that unless he was a very unusual man for his time, if he lived in London he went to the pub in London. Because everyone did. Beer was safer to drink than water, and you had to go to the pub and get it. And if you wanted to sit back and relax with friends, there was nowhere else for most people to do that other than the pub.<br />
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In the absence of evidence, you can only make informed guesses - just because there's no proof of something doesn't mean it didn't happen, so you have to construct the most likely scenario based on the soundest possible assumptions.<br />
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My argument in the book was that Shakespeare definitely worked in Southwark, where the Globe Theatre was, so it's likely he lived close by - most historians believe he did. If he lived and worked in Southwark, he would have visited Southwark's pubs. We know he was aware of the White Hart pub on Borough High Street, because he set a scene in one of his plays there. The White Hart stood next to the George, so he must have been aware of the George too. The George and its immediate neighbours were the most famous pubs in London at the time, which we know thanks to the meticulous work of John Stow, a contemporary of Shakespeare's. It's thought Shakespeare lived in the area for ten years. If he was going to pubs most days, it's far more likely that he did drink in the George at least occasionally than that he didn't.<br />
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On this, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death (and the 452nd anniversary of his birth) I would love to be able to announce that new evidence has come to light that Shakespeare really did drink in the George. But in all my research on the place, it never quite works out like that.<br />
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I was indebted to an American academic called Martha Carlin when I was writing my book. She's done more research on medieval Southwark than anyone else, and she recently contacted me to tell me that she's found the first and so far only record of someone claiming to see Shakespeare in a specific pub.<br />
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Of course, it's not the George. It's the George's next door neighbour. It always bloody is.<br />
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The White Hart stood to the left of the George on Borough High Street. Not only did Shakespeare write about it, Dickens used it as the location of a crucial scene in the Pickwick Papers. To the right of the George stood the Tabard. This was the inn which Chaucer used as the starting point for the Canterbury Tales. At the time he wrote those stories, he could have picked any of several inns lining Borough High Street. He could have chosen the George. Instead he chose its next door neighbour, immortalising the Tabard for ever as the birthplace of English literature.<br />
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The three greatest names in English letters, then, each of them associated strongly with the old inns of Borough High Street, each of them making their strongest link with the inns either side of the George.<br />
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Now, Martha writes, the words of an anonymous actuary writing in 1643 have been unearthed, describing “Some notes for my Perambulation in and round ye Citye of London for six miles and Remnants of divers worthie things and men”.<br />
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The author announces that his survey is intended “only to notice those places and things that have been passed by or littled <i>[sic] </i>mentiond <i>[sic] </i>by those greate Antiquaries that have written of this noble Citye and ye which places are fast ruining as the Tabard Inne and ye many houses of Priesthood old Monuments Halls Palaces and Houses of its greate Citizens and Lords and may be useful to searchers of Antiquitye in time to come.”<div>
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The Tabard Inn, like many of London's great landmarks, is by now falling into ruin - so we learn that the lamenting the passing of great pubs is nothing new. <br /><br />When he gets to the Tabard, our anonymous correspondent writes, “Ye Tabard I find to have been ye resort Mastere Will Shakspear Sir Sander Duncombe Lawrence Fletcher Richard Burbage Ben Jonson and ye rest of their roystering associates in King Jameses time as in ye lange room they have cut their names on ye Pannels.”</div>
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So graffiting the pub was nothing new either! </div>
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Unfortunately, Shakespeare's vandalism of the Tabard was lost when the inn burnt down along with the George and the White Hart, in the great fire of Southwark in 1676. All three were rebuilt the following year. The George is the only one that has survived until today. </div>
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So the Tabard - already already famous as Chaucer's Local - now has a far better claim to be Shakespeare's Local than its neighbour. </div>
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But thanks to this find, we now know that Shakespeare really did go to the pub in Borough High Street. Did he and his fellow 'roysterers' ever do a crawl of the great inns? Did he graffiti the George as well as the Tabard? Most likely, we'll never know. The idea of the group of players carving their names into the panels suggests, to me at any rate, that they were regular visitors who wanted to leave their mark. It makes perfect sense that Shakespeare would choose the Tabard because of its associations with Chaucer, placing himself in a great literary tradition. But did he only ever go to the Tabard, and never to the pub next door? I find that hard to believe. </div>
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The point is, the George is the only one of those great inns to have survived the coming of the railways. The Tabard, as well as the White Hart, fell into ruin because they were up for sale for years and no one wanted to buy them. By the time the Tabard was finally demolished, it looked like this:</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Tabard, 1870s</td></tr>
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The George was the only one of the great inns to escape this fate, the only one that's still there to write about and to visit. The main reason it did so was thanks to an extraordinary landlady who used every means at her disposal to keep it going as the inns either side were being pulled down - including telling outrageous lies and exaggerations about its associations with Dickens and Shakespeare to attract tourists and build fascination with this last survivor. </div>
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Let's just say I make no apologies for having sympathy with her aim.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-50711700348855902652016-04-20T09:36:00.000+01:002016-04-20T09:36:34.192+01:00When Michael met Stef and Martin<i><b>Trawling through old notebooks can yield unexpected treasures.</b></i><br />
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<br />
The new beer book I'm currently working on was initially inspired by a few experiences that I'd never properly written up and used.<br />
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Sometimes I'll visit a brewery or go to an event and I'm inspired by it, taking pages of notes, and I'll decide to write them up for one of my columns. A typical column is 700-800 words long, and while the column itself might be good, it only skates across the surface of the notes and observations I've made.<br />
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When I decided to write a book about hops, it was because I knew I had unused material that I'd gathered on a visit to the National Hop Collection in Kent, a jaunt to Slovenia to see the hop farms there, and a hazy account of Chmelfest, the hop blessing festival in the town of Zatec in the Czech Republic, home of the revered Saaz hop. I'd written up the <a href="http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/Pete-Brown-Hop-to-it-get-planting">National Hop Collection</a> and <a href="http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/Hop-portunity-knocks-in-Slovenia-for-UK-brewers">Slovenia</a> for short <i>Publican's Morning Advertiser</i> columns, but I'd never known quite what to do with the Chmelfest notes. That's where the idea for this book was born. About thirty seconds after deciding to use these three stories as the basis for a book about hops, I thought, 'Why just hops?' And <i><a href="https://unbound.co.uk/books/what-are-you-drinking">What Are You Drinking</a>?</i> was born.<br />
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So now I'm deep into pulling the book together, writing up notes from trips over the last year and digging into my pile of old notebooks to find bits from over the last few years that also belong in this book.<br />
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I went to Chmelfest back in 2007, just as I was starting work on the first <i>Cask Report</i> and while I was trying to plan the sea voyage that would become my third book, <i><a href="http://petebrown.blogspot.co.uk/p/hops-and-glory.html">Hops and Glory</a></i>. So I dug into my pile of notebooks trying to find the one I'd been using in early 2007.<br />
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It turned out to be the same one I'd been using in late 2006 - number 6 in the stash of anally numbered notebooks I began when I first started travelling to write about beer. Chmelfest is about two thirds of the way through, and the notes are more intact and coherent than I have any right to expect. But near the front of the book, undated, is a short set of notes - just two pages - about a meeting between Michael Jackson and Stefano Cossi and Martin Dickie, who were then two young brewers at a new brewery called Thornbridge.<br />
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I remember this meeting taking place at the legendary White Horse pub in West London. I can't remember why I was there, why I'd been invited, but the two brewers were sitting against the wall with Michael facing them across a table. I was sitting two seats down, watching, not daring to join in.<br />
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I remember being inspired by Michael that night, and later feeling lucky that I was there. A year on from this meeting Michael would be dead and Martin would have left Thornbridge to start up BrewDog. Martin has spoken often about what an inspiration the meeting was to him. It's become part of BrewDog folklore, a key event in the origin story, which makes me feel weird that I'd been there as a silent observer.<br />
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The occasion was the launch of a new beer called Kipling. Michael thought it was interesting because it used a new hop called Nelson Sauvin which came from New Zealand, and no one had brewed in Britain using New Zealand hops before. (In my notes I wrote 'Nelson Sauverne', which is how it sounded when Martin said it.) Martin and Stef had encountered a sample of these hops and immediately ordered some in. They wanted to make a beer that celebrated their flavour, because they were already, according to my notes, 'bringing in obscure US hops' for beers like Jaipur.<br />
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In a demonstration of my stunning beer writing skills at the time, my tasting notes stretch to 'grapefruit in the finished beer.' I also wrote down 'Fills in the gaps that are left by the flavour spikes in spicy, deep-fried spring rolls.' I don't know if I wrote this because that's what the beer was paired with because I didn't write any more detail about what we were eating and drinking. I may have been quoting someone. (Does anyone really think spring rolls have flavour spikes?)<br />
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I'll spare you my clumsy notes about Thornbridge and my observations about its two young, moody brewers. The reason for sharing the reminiscence is the notes I made about Michael Jackson. I was paying more attention to him during the interview than I was to the two brewers.<br />
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I'm tempted to tidy up my notes and write them better. It's a rubbish piece of writing, embarrassing in parts, but I wanted to share the sentiments it contains, so here it is quoted as I wrote it, unvarnished by later experience or hindsight:<br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Michael going on - interesting enough stories. Meeting some of these people is a bit special. He's created this thing, still sees it w the novelty he genuinely discovered for the first time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Gentle, warming method of questioning that draws the best out of his subject - "Why this beer?" "What did you think of the hop the first time you tasted it?"</span><br />
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It doesn't seem like much, written up. But this was an absolute inspiration to a fledgling beer writer. The obvious passion, undimmed after thirty-odd years. And the focus on the people, how they felt, making it about them and getting the best from them. I remember sitting there thinking, "THIS is how you do it."<br />
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I still think that. My own notes are better now.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-1350034443902469372016-04-17T14:38:00.002+01:002016-04-18T10:27:49.376+01:00Why I haven't been blogging much<b><i>A cautionary tale, with a happy ending. </i></b><br />
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About two years ago I started getting shooting pains down my left leg. I went to the doctor about it and they said it was sciatica. Although the pain was in my leg, it was actually a result of nerves in my spine being irritated. "It'll go away eventually," said the doctor. "If it gets too bad, just take some painkillers. Exercise will help, as would losing a bit of weight."<br />
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Eventually the pain did go away, but every now and then it would return. In January 2015 it came back and didn't go away.<br />
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One morning at the end of January, I was in a hotel near Heathrow airport where I was attending a brewer's brand conference and workshop. I woke in quite extraordinary pain, the worst I've ever felt. I went from thinking "This is embarrassing. I hope there's no one next door who can hear me screaming," to thinking, "Actually, I hope there IS someone next door who can hear me screaming, and they call for help." I realised I was in quite a lot of trouble and decided to phone someone. My phone was six inches away from my grasp on the bedside table. It too me half an hour to reach it.<br />
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Very soon after I did, I was in the back of an ambulance greedily sucking down most of a canister of gas and air. When I got to the hospital they gave me liquid morphine. It took the edge off a bit, but I still couldn't move without yelling.<br />
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Two days later I was discharged with a pile of drugs including Tramadol and Diazepam. I spent the next three weeks feeling fucking wonderful in a kind of dissociated way.<br />
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It turned out I had two slipped discs at the base of my spine that were pushing against my spinal cord. I had to have an injection of steroids into my spinal column to sort it out. I'm fine now, but the pain is still there as suggestion, reminding me of my promise to lose weight, improve my posture, take regular exercise and build my core strength so it never comes back properly again.<br />
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I haven't yet kept that promise, mainly because of what I did when I was fucked and bombed on very strong drugs.<br />
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About a week after I stopped taking the drugs, the latest issue of the <i>Publican's Morning Advertiser </i>came through the door. As soon as I saw it I thought, "Shit! I was supposed to write my column for this week!" I briefly wondered why they hadn't chased me for it, before turning to the page where it usually runs to see what they'd done instead.<br />
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There was my column.<br />
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I had written and submitted it as usual, but had absolutely no memory of doing so. Technically it was a bit sloppy, but it was uncharacteristically warm and affectionate.<br />
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I later discovered that I'd written four different features while I was high. Four that I've been able to find, anyway.<br />
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I had also done something else that was really, really stupid.<br />
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My last narrative book, <i><a href="http://petebrown.blogspot.co.uk/p/shakespeares-local-six-centuries-of.html">Shakespeare's Local</a></i>, was very successful when it launched. It was picked up by BBC Radio 4 as their Book of the Week and read out by Tony Robinson, who made it much funnier than my writing is, and the book spent the week before Christmas sitting comfortably in Amazon's Top 100, outselling Hunger Games books and Downton Abbey tie-ins. It was easily the most successful book launch I've had to date. And it almost killed my book publishing career. <br />
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The issue was, it represented a transition point from my being a beer writer to being a mainstream, general non-fiction author. The publisher who had bought my first four books - and specifically, the man who had edited the last two - felt quite understandably that my next book should push me right into the bestseller lists, that I should be, if not the new Bill Bryson, then perhaps the next Stuart Maconie or Simon Garfield. I was very happy to agree.<br />
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The problem was coming up with an idea for a book that fit the bill.<br />
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I spent the next two years submitting ideas that were rejected. The usual response was along the lines of "Well, I'd read it like a shot, but I'm not sure it's going to sell beyond your current audience."<br />
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Mainstream publishing is changing and getting more difficult. There's no longer room for 'the midlist' - books like mine that sell OK and cover their costs but don't build and break out. My confidence began to plummet, until we reached the break-up conversation that goes along the lines of, "If you'd like to move on and see other people, that's OK with me."<br />
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I started pitching ideas to other people. I didn't have a clear strategy, I just knew I wanted to start work on another book. If writing books is what you do - and for me, everything else is filler that keeps me busy and pays the mortgage between books - whenever you finish one you're effectively unemployed until you sign a deal for the next one.<br />
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Did I want to carry on trying to crack a different, broader market? Or did I want to go back to writing about beer and pubs? Yes.<br />
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So I was having various different conversations with various different publishers about various different ideas when my back went and I got taken to hospital.<br />
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Then, during a particularly rotten, bleak and desolate comedown from the drugs that was every bit as miserable as the high was euphoric, I realised that I'd signed three different contracts, with three different publishers, to deliver three different books - all within the same timescale.<br />
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This was a really fucking stupid thing to do.<br />
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It normally takes me two to three years to write and research a book. Now, I had to write and research three in little over a year. And I had to break it to each publisher that while I was very happy about our new relationship, I was also seeing someone else.<br />
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This did not make for the kind of stress-free time I needed if I wanted to get happier and healthier. And so I haven't. But now, fourteen months later, I've just finished writing the second of the three books, and I've managed to delay the third one, which I've started writing up today. I've mentioned them all at various times here and there, but with the first two now out of the way and with their release dates confirmed, here's what's coming up.<br />
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<b>The Pub: A Cultural Institution</b><br />
<i>Publication Date: 18th August 2016</i><br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pub-Cultural-Institution-Country-Corner/dp/1910254525/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1460897141&sr=1-1&keywords=the+pub+pete+brown"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsVcEnrM-TR6uuGwSCzRHTjGOlVOBQ47pKi-IHMDwu5bmEcZfRQ1C08imDDH8blhNrp_KSOhHpQxQ40NMxlD6ctL1Y-8d0EcnSvZF4gxygzBu1XBtugAPpPVNtHS5lNS46pN8_cw/s400/516AKzPDtkL.jpg" width="343" /></a></div>
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For all I've written about pubs, I've never really done pub reviews. This book is one of those coffee table, picture-led affairs with lots of gorgeous photography of old inns, pubs signs and real ale casks. But I also wanted it to be much more than that.<br />
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The book contains reviews of 300 pubs across the UK. 250 of these are short, 80-word listings, but fifty of them are double-page spreads featuring longer essays. Rather than just say what beers are on or what the decor is like (information which would quickly go out of date and is better sourced from websites) I've tried to review each of these pubs on its atmosphere, which is, after all, the main reason we choose one pub over another.<br />
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It's much harder to do than reviewing the physical space or offering, and I don't quite succeed with every one of the fifty. But I've also tried to make each one a story about the many different reasons why pubs are so special: a couple focus on legendary publicans, some focus on the relationship between the pub and its environment, one celebrates the ritual of that coming-of-age moment many of us experienced in our first pub, another talks about the institution of the pub juke box. One is about a marriage proposal, while another sees a pub help sort out an old man who has been made temporarily homeless.<br />
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I'm now going through the inevitable phase of "Sounds good! Did you write about the Three Old Codgers in Little Frumpington? Whaaaaat? You've never been to the Codgers? You haven't lived, mate." If you know the best pub ever, it's probably not in here. But I promise you the 300 featured pubs are very good indeed.<br />
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Available for pre-order on Amazon - click the pic above for a link.<br />
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<b>The Apple Orchard</b><br />
<i>Publication Date: 29th September 2016</i><br />
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When I wrote <i><a href="http://petebrown.blogspot.co.uk/p/worlds-best-cider.html">World's Best Cider</a></i> with Bill Bradshaw, I spent a lot of time in orchards. I was moved by these beautiful places, enraptured by the customs and traditions around apple growing, and the people who kept them alive. I made loads of quite lyrical notes and observations, most of which never made it into the cider book because it wasn't that kind of book. So I decided I wanted to revisit the subject.<br />
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The result is a book that follows the apple year, from blossom time in spring through to wassail in January. It explores the cultural meaning of the apple as well as its practical value. Was the apple the Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden? Could it have been? Does it matter? If it wasn't, why do we think it was? Exploring questions like these was like pulling a loose thread that led me all over the place. There are ancient Pagan festivals, an appreciation of soil, discussions about GM, and quite a bit of morris dancing. It turned into a sort of affectionate tour of British life and customs, as well as an exploration of our relationship with food and where it comes from. It's possibly the best piece of writing I've done to date. It has nothing to do with beer, although quite a bit of cider is drunk.<br />
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I'm enormously chuffed that Penguin will be publishing <i>The Apple Orchard</i> under their 'Particular Books' imprint. We haven't quite sorted the cover yet, but it is already listed on Amazon and available for pre-order <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-Orchard-Pete-Brown/dp/1846148839/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1460898009&sr=1-1&keywords=pete+brown+apple+orchard">here</a>.<br />
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<b>What Are You Drinking?</b><br />
<i>Publication Date: TBC Spring 2017</i><br />
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I've already written quite a bit about my book on hops, barley, yeast and water because it's being published by <a href="https://unbound.co.uk/">Unbound</a>, who use crowdfunding to cover the cost of publication, so I've had to flog the idea quite hard to potential subscribers.<br />
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The best thing about this is that by having to tell people about the book before I'd really done very much work on it, the process of funding changed the shape and scope of the book. Brewers, maltsters and hop growers have been in touch suggesting I visit them to learn more about what they do, and something that started life as quite a theoretical idea has become much more hands-on. I've picked hops in Kent, sat on a combine harvester as it reaps Maris Otter barley, watched speciality malts being made in Bamberg, seen hops being picked in farms in the Yakima Valley that are bigger than the entire British hop crop, visited the laboratory in Copenhagen where single strain brewing yeasts were first isolated and cultivated, drunk Burton well water straight from the ground and delivered fresh, green Galaxy hops to a brewery in Australia and dry-hopped a beer with them. It's been utterly amazing, and if I can only do justice to the incredible source material I've gathered, the book will be worth the wait.<br />
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We reached our crowdfunding target back in October, but you can still become a subscriber if you want. Subscribers get their name in the back of the book, get access to exclusive updates about how the book research and writing process is coming along, and will also get their copies a month or so before publication. If you're interested, <a href="https://unbound.co.uk/books/what-are-you-drinking">here's the link</a>. <br />
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Some people have been uncomfortable with the idea of a crowdfunded book. If you don't like the idea that's fine, because on publication the book will receive the same distribution as any book from a traditional publisher and you can buy it on Amazon or any good book shop.<br />
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I will be blogging more frequently again now, having got the first two books out of the way. Sorry the last little while on here has mainly been me trying to flog stuff. I'll be doing some actual beer blogging again very soon.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30743480.post-51359033955792658852016-02-25T11:43:00.001+00:002016-02-25T11:43:37.855+00:00Beer Marketing Awards: New Awards Date, Deadline for Entries Extended<br />
The second annual <a href="http://beermarketingawards.co.uk/">Beer Marketing Awards</a> have been moved from 14th April, and will now take place in 8th September at the Boiler House, the Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London E1.<br />
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The postponement follows some uncertainty about availability of the venue. Everyone who attended the first event in 2015 thought it was a perfect venue for such an event, but for that reason it's a very popular space, so we decided to do it later and do it as well as we possibly can.<br />
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This means that the deadline for entries - which was originally this week - has now been extended until 31st March. Entries have been coming in thick and fast, but if you were running out of time for yours, now you have time to give it an extra polish.<br />
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The idea behind the awards is to celebrate the promotion of beer across all channels. In today's communications landscape, effective marketing is no longer about who has the biggest budget - the strength of an idea can compete across various channels. Last year we had global, regional and microbrewers going head-to-head in some categories, and it was by no means assured that those with the biggest budget and external agencies won out.<br />
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After feedback last year, we have also introduced staggered entry fees based on the size of the brewery (or if you're an agency, the size of the brewery you work for), to make it mort affordable for small brewers to enter.<br />
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More details and entry forms are available at <a href="http://beermarketingawards.co.uk/">http://beermarketingawards.co.uk/</a>.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03011702209832734676noreply@blogger.com0