Pete Brown's Beer Blog

Some thoughts on writing about beer history

2012-01-12T09:34:00.000Z

As I emerge from the British Library, blinking like a mole in the winter sun, I see Martyn Cornell has been doing what he enjoys best, demolishing a passing historical claim that someone else has made.

There was a spat before Christmas about the excellent Oxford Companion to Beer. Many in the beer blogosphere were queueing up to find errors and cite them as proof that the book is worthless, or at the very least, deeply flawed. This turned into a rather worrying witch hunt where almost any positive mention of the OCB online was rooted out and lambasted (one beer writer was even attacked on his Facebook page for posting that he was looking forward to reading it).

My response to this was along the lines of 'of course there are errors - but if you take the thing as a whole, it's a great piece of work'. This was (mis)interpreted by some as me saying that errors didn't matter, and the pursuit of truth, of fact, in beer history was unimportant.

That is not what I meant at all. If I did mean that, I wouldn't, for example, have spent all day yesterday in the London Metropolitan Archives reading through letters sent between brewers Flower & Sons and their lawyers regarding their taking over the lease of the George Inn, Southwark - something that will surely take only a line or two in my new book, but which I took a thousand words of notes on, because I want to make sure I get it absolutely right.

What I do think, though, after spending nearly a year doing research that is as forensic and detailed as I can possibly do on the history of coaching inns, pubs in general and one pub in particular, is that some who are interested in the history of beer are in danger of strangling the study of it by imposing standards that are too strict, that are tighter than any proper academic historian would insist upon.

If you're not that bothered about the study of beer history, please stop reading now, because you're going to get really bored if you don't.

First, a few caveats:

One, I greatly admire the work that people like Martyn Cornell and Ron Pattinson do. I know from great experience myself that it's not exactly easy, fun or rewarding to trawl through historical documents in search of the truth. It's much easier to simply cite what some bloke said in a book eighty years ago without checking where he got it from. Standards of beer scholarship are improving, and people like Martyn and Ron are playing a significant role in this.

Two, I don't want to excuse errors - where they are in fact errors, as opposed to differing interpretations. And I'm not here to defend the OCB's entry on the yard of ale. I actually agree with Martyn that the original yard of ale entry in OCB looks like it's wrong, though I believe that it's the result of a simple confusion with the 'stirrup cup', which is a similar shape to the yard, but smaller - still wrong and in need of correction, but not exactly the biggest controversy ever to rear its beery head.

Three, although this post was prompted by Martyn's latest, it shouldn't be read (just) as a criticism of Marytn - he makes points similar to those below towards the end of his post, and I agree with a lot of what he says there. What follows has been inspired by Martyn's post - and other comments he's made previously - rather than being a direct rebuttal. I'm sure he would agree with much of what follows.

With those out of the way, my main beef is this: there seems to be a growing view that if there isn't definite, written, primary source proof of something, than we cannot assert that it is true in an historical context, and we shouldn't be saying it.

I'm sorry, but that's just not right. If real historians behaved like this, we wouldn't have any history at all.

Having come fresh from the coalface, here's how written historical sources work: since the mid-twentieth century and the age of mass communication, you can find lots of references to pretty much anything if you know where to look. The biggest problem facing future historians looking at the early 21st century will be too much material relating to any subject, not too little.

Go back to the nineteenth century, and it's a bit harder. There are newspapers and magazines - quite a lot of them - and if you're lucky enough to find databases that have them as word-searchable PDFs, you can fillet all mentions of your chosen subject from tons of last century's chip paper within minutes. The trouble is, you know how now, the mainstream press don't write much about beer? Well, they didn't much then, either. For example, over 99.9% of the 16,000 mentions of 'India Pale Ale' in the Burley Collection of 18th and 19th century newspapers are in the classified ads section, and while the first few you look at are very revealing (that's where I discovered the earliest actual mention of 'India Pale Ale' for example) after that, they're all the same.

Go back before that, and most of the population were illiterate. Newspapers die out altogether when you reach the seventeenth century. Now it gets trickier. There's the odd diarist whose work has survived, which is why if you read anything historical about the seventeenth century (including my new book) you will unfailingly discover what John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys thought about the subject at hand.

Before that, anything that the Church had direct involvement in, you're laughing, because they kept copious records of everything. Anything the monarch did, you're on safe ground. But social history? Stuff that everyday people did? That gets tricky. There are legal records if your subject got into trouble. But unless the Church or the law were interested, written records start to become very thin on the ground. You're relying on diarists, the odd pamphleteer (who usually had a particular view on his subject - many of our best descriptions of Elizabethan alehouses come from Puritans who thought they were the 'nests of Satan') and the occasional, isolated traveller or chronicler, and you kind of have to go with what those individuals say.

In terms of tangible fact, this is then supplemented by archaeological evidence. This is incredibly useful. But foodstuffs, clothing and almost anything else soft and perishable haven't survived.

Our accurate record of what Elizabethan theatres looked like inside rests on a one page description and a drawing done by a Swiss traveller in 1594 - the rebuilt Globe Theatre relied on this, and the partial foundations of the original. There are three surviving portraits which we think are William Shakespeare, and scant references to him in legal documents. There isn't even a definitely agreed version of his complete works, as whole plays were rarely copied. Bill Bryson set out to write a book on Shakespeare that just stuck to the known facts. It's less than 200 pages long, and he's padded it out with all sorts of more general stuff about Elizabethan England. And this is Shakespeare - not some pub, brewery or drinking custom.

So when primary source stuff gets thin, what do you do?

You do not 'make things up'.

But you do become flexible.

Martyn regularly pours scorn on historical claims that are made long after the fact. But the first real account of the Battle of Hastings (leaving aside the Bayeux Tapestry) was written by William of Malmesbury over a century after to happened, and historians accept it as definitive. Historians haven't always provided academic references and footnotes - that doesn't mean their work is invalid. Also, when most people were illiterate, much history was handed down orally before someone put it to paper. Inevitably, this introduces an element of Chinese Whispers. But it's that or nothing - and academic historians, while not always accepting such accounts as gospel (now there's an interesting example) will usually at least take the gist of it to be true, or use it as a guide. So while I'm not saying (because I don't believe) that the yard of ale was invented for stage coach drivers, I am arguing that the fact that this claim wasn't made until the 1950s is not on its own sufficient grounds to dismiss it.

Martyn's other maxim is along the lines of 'the first law of history is don't assume'. I'd like to see where these universally agreed laws of history are written down, and have a look at what the others are, because in the history I've been reading - mostly books written by academics who work in history departments in reputable universities - educated, reasoned assumptions are being made all the time. 'Could', 'might', 'perhaps,', 'possibly' and 'maybe' are some of the most popular words in academic history. Where I would agree with Martyn 100% is that if it is a 'could' or a 'might', any writer - especially one working on something as illustrious as the OCB - has an obligation to make this clear rather than writing 'was' or 'did', and this is a sin of mine that I've now resolved to fix. But I'd argue that this is the main area where standards need to be improved. The simple 'there's no written evidence so we must assume it's wrong' approach simply is not how history works.

These issues have particular relevance for the study of beer and pubs, because at the time, a lot of this shit just didn't get written down. Whenever the yard of ale was invented, and for whatever purpose, no one whose work survives thought it worth recording. So what are you going to do? It obviously was invented by someone, at some point, so we are not wrong to speculate on what did happen.

If we don't, we reduce history to virtually nothing. And we have to look in a broader context. That first mention of 'India Pale Ale' came at least seventy years after strong, hoppy pale had been exported to the Indian market - so how can we assert when this beer called 'IPA' first appeared?

The now pretty-much dismissed claim that George Hodgson began exporting pale ale to India in 1785 is based on this being the date it was first advertised in the Calcutta Gazette. But the reason it wasn't advertised before then is not that the beer didn't exist in India, but that the Calcutta Gazette didn't. So when did Hodsgon first export his beer?

Another useful example for me is the story that IPA was first introduced to Britain in 1827 when a ship bound for India was shipwrecked off Liverpool, the casks washed up on the beach, and were auctioned by the ship's insurance company, and the locals loved the beer and started demanding it at home. Martyn has dismissed this as 'myth' because the claim was made fifty years after the fact, and it's not mentioned anywhere else. He says it never happened. Now, if we're talking about how IPA was introduced to Britain, I totally agree. A quick look at Peter Matthias's brilliant brewing history shows that Bass and Allsopp were advertising pale ales domestically in the early 1820s. In the 1830s, IPA became popular in Britain among families returning from India. Hodgson, while being squeezed out of the Indian market, saw an opportunity back home and started advertising his beer as the taste of India. But to say the shipwreck never happened? That's an even bolder claim than the original assertion. Visit any Cornish coastal pub, for example, and you'll find walls decorated with facsimiles of posters advertising auctions of cargo from shipwrecks from the early nineteenth century. They happened all the time - surely at least one of these auctions would have included India-bound beer. I'm certain that the 1827 shipwreck did happen, that India-bound beer was sold to Scousers and that they loved it. After all, why would anyone simply make up such a story from their imagination? But this is not how IPA was introduced to Britain. It's an important distinction in how we read historical data, how we interpret it.

Writing history is all about interpretation, and we have to make assumptions, especially when studying the history of the beer and pubs. For example, I will be claiming that inn-yard theatre happened in the George Inn, Southwark, despite a complete lack of evidence that it did. Why? Because there are records of it happening in inn-yards across London and all over the country. It often happened when there was a big fair. It happened in larger inn-yards. The George had a large inn-yard. Southwark Fair was one of the biggest fairs in the country. Plays happened in the yard of the Queens Arms just down the road. Therefore, I can assume, with a high degree of confidence, that plays also happened in the George.

One final point - and forgive me if this sounds defensive. As a historian, you have an obligation to be as thorough in your research as you can be. But as a writer aiming at a mainstream audience, you have an obligation to be as readable and interesting as you can be. For the mainstream writer, in any discipline, it's a balance between the two, and Bryson's Shakespeare is a perfect example of how to do it brilliantly. Just because the detail isn't on the page in front of you, doesn't mean it's not there.

At the end of Martyn's yard of ale post he gives a brilliant acknowledgement that we cannot research every single last fact back to primary sources, so I don't think we're that far apart in the overall scheme of things.

But please - even on the big stuff, sometimes, just because there is no primary source, that doesn't mean it's wrong. Sorry, but that's not how history works.

=/=

If you've read this far, then you're obviously pretty interested in beer history. So I'd just like to give a plug to the Brewery History Society. Membership is only £15 a year, and you get a lot for your money. Martyn is on the editorial board so he would definitely agree with me on this!

The Rules of Drinking

2012-01-09T15:51:00.002Z

There's light at the end of the tunnel. Switching metaphors at the points, if it were a loaf of bread, you'd just be able to see it start to rise.

It's been a very long three months, but on NYE I printed off a rough, shaky first draft of my next book. The chapters that aren't quite finished are bloody awful. The chapters that are finished are pretty good - or at least, my long-suffering editor and wife think so. And I have two weeks left to kick, bitch-slap, coax, polish, persuade, trick and massage the rest of it into shape.

This week, then, represents a partial return to the blogosphere. Don't try to pretend you missed me, now.

I'm ashamed to say my first post-book post is a shameless plug, but it is for something I think you'll like.

Last May I spent an afternoon in the Jolly Butchers with a BBC film crew. I'd just about forgotten about it, and then I got a call this morning to say that the programme is finally going out this week.

It's a Timeshift documentary called The Rules of Drinking, and it charts our relationship with booze, particularly since the Second World War. Me and a chap called Iain Gately, whose book on the History of Drink you should have on your shelves, are the two main contributors, only you're spared having to watch much of me by some fantastic archive footage they've found to go over the things we're talking about.

Here's the blurb, from BBC4:

Timeshift digs into the archive to discover the unwritten rules that have governed the way we drink in Britain.

In the pubs and working men's clubs of the forties and fifties there were strict customs governing who stood where. To be invited to sup at the bar was a rite of passage for many young men, and it took years for women to be accepted into these bastions of masculinity. As the country prospered and foreign travel became widely available, so new drinking habits were introduced as we discovered wine and, even more exotically, cocktails.

People began to drink at home as well as at work, where journalists typified a tradition of the liquid lunch. Advertising played its part as lager was first sold as a woman's drink and then the drink of choice for young men with a bit of disposable income. The rules changed and changed again, but they were always there - unwritten and unspoken, yet underwriting our complicated relationship with drinking.

The waspish and lovely Grace Dent gave the programme a fantastic write-up in the Guardian last Saturday, acknowledging that there is such a thing as binge drinking, without being judgemental about it or trying to build it to a point of hysteria. She concludes:

Timeshift doesn't attempt to proffer solutions, it just shows us our history in plain, beautifully archived images. This is our green and pleasant (and often incredibly pissed) country. Poor us, poor us, pour us another beer.

So: it's on 9pm Wednesday, then repeated at 3am Thursday just so mid-week pissheads can see it, then its on again at 11pm Saturday, and again at 3.30am on Sunday for weekend pissheads.

OK, Timeshift said no to the documentary on my new book that was pitched to them. But don't hold that against them. Watch the show, with a bottle of something good.

Brew Dog London opens!

2011-12-14T08:06:00.000Z

Blimey - a look at my Wikio ranking (if anyone still looks at Wikio rankings) shows what happens when you don't blog for six weeks...

In case you've not been following, the reason I seem to have given up blogging is that I have to focus on my new book. It's going well: I've written about 45,000 words (about 140 pages) so far, but with a mid-January deadline I won't be having much of a Christmas, and I won't be blogging too often before it's finished.

But I just wanted to do a quick post because I went to the journalist's launch of Brew Dog's new London bar last night in Camden, North London.

And it's really just to reiterate what I said when I visited their Edinburgh bar in the summer, and express my delight that they've opened one a bit closer to my house.

No brewer divides opinion and stirs up as much controversy as Brew Dog. And they do that deliberately. Sometimes I write to slag off their childish pranks, sometimes to praise them. About two years ago half the blogosphere was devoted to discussion of their antics (oh, and their beers) and I've read some people say they gave up reading blogs because they were sick of reading about Brew Dog.

But the company is four years old now and maturing rather nicely. And the bars - which are starting to spread to many major UK cities - really are excellent.

Purists will be upset that they don't do any cask beers at all, but this would be a good experiment: if you're prepared to be open-minded, it's worth going along and challenging the keg offering to deliver. I think there's something there for everyone. Last night I was talking to someone who writes for London Drinker, CAMRA London's magazine, and we were disagreeing about keg beer - he was saying he could still taste the gas in the beers he was drinking and that he didn't like that and wished they were available on cask. But later, he tried some of the stronger beers and came back to tell me they were excellent.

So there's a great range on offer. And the other thing I love about Brew Dog bars is that when I walk in, and I feel a little bit old and that the bar might be too cool for school, this is dispelled as soon as I actually get to the bar. Brew Dog bars could so easily be too cool for school, and they're not. They're unpretentious and run by people with a genuine passion for beer, a passion they want to spread.

Finally, I went here directly from a new 'bar and kitchen' (ugh!) run by a reasonably large pub operator, that's moving with the times by stocking an interesting range of craft beers that will be familiar to geeks but you really don't see in many places at all. That's to be welcomed. But £4.25 for a pint of cask Meantime Pale Ale (4.2% ABV), brewed less then ten miles away, was taking the fucking piss. By contrast, the prices at Brew Dog were perfectly reasonable for what you were getting.

Gotta leave it there - got to go and write about Princess Margaret and the Bishop of Southwark having a lock in.

But if you're in London, go to Brew Dog Camden. And of you're not, don't worry - a Brew Dog bar will probably be opening a bit closer to you sooner than you think.

Someone is wrong on the internet.

2011-10-30T17:03:00.000Z

Add caption

No time to blog at the moment as I struggle to get back on track with my book. But this is all I have to say anyway.

Thanks to my best mate Chris for first sending me this a while back, last time someone was wrong on the internet. And kudos to the original cartoonist, whoever that may be - the image has been repeated so often I wasn't able to find out.

Blogging, ethics and payola - what is OK?

2011-10-13T09:04:00.001+01:00

As beer blogging matures as a medium there are an increasing number of discussions on what constitutes ethical blogging. Is it OK to write about a brewery's beers if they've taken you on a tour or sent you free product? Or if you've done some kind of consultancy for them?

I'll come back to these in a minute - different bloggers have different points of view, and there are many shades of grey.

But I've recently been approached and asked to participate in one activity that, by any standards, is not OK at all. It's ethically wrong. In fact, it is probably illegal.

Two weeks ago, I received an email from a man called Barry Sonders who works for an agency called Translation, some kind of PR/communications agency based in New York. Barry's email read as follows:

Hey Pete,

I'm working with a beer brand that is looking to "seed" some stories

on blogs like yours about a new beer that is being released.

I was wondering what the cost would be for me if I wanted to seed

1 story a week for a month. Basically, what I mean by seeding is

that you'd blog or someone would write something saying... "I heard this

beer is X% alcohol content, etc"...

Let me know if this is something you'd be interested in doing and again,

if so, what is the price tag associated with that.

Thanks!

Barry

Now there was no way I was ever going to agree to this, and I immediately decided to write this blog post about it. But before I did so, I wanted to be better informed. Firstly, I wrote back to Barry to see if I could find out what brand was trying to persuade me to sacrifice my integrity in this fashion:

Hi Barry,

It kind of depends on the brand, to be honest. Are you able to reveal which beer or brewer?

Pete

Barry, seemingly, could not be drawn that easily:

To be honest, I can't right now. It's a major brand, definitely not in the craft beer arena

or of a mass audience, middle america appeal.

However, there was a link to Translation's website at the bottom of his email. I followed this link, and found a client list that included Coors among a list of reputable companies such as P&G and Johnson & Johnson.

So I contacted Kristy at MolsonCoors UK, who immediately replied that she was 'appalled' by this proposal, and contacted MillerCoors in the US (Coors is in a different JV over there) to see if this was something they knew about. She got this reply from Pete Marino at MillerCoors HQ:

This has nothing to do with MillerCoors or any of our brands. Translation does not do any work for MillerCoors, nor have they ever. They did at one time work for legacy Coors Brewing Company and they have the Coors logo on their website under the title brands they have influenced. This doesnt mean those brands are active clients and I can assure you we don't work with Translation. I am not sure who they are representing here, but... we dont have any association with Barry or Translation and we do not condone this behavior.

Further down the email trail between Coors people, someone suggests the whole thing might be a hoax, as there are certainly no plans for a new US beer launch by MillerCoors at the moment.

I wanted to make all this very clear before moving on, because this is serious shit, and it's important to state that whichever brand it is, it's nothing to do with MolsonCoors or MillerCoors, who object to such practices on both legal and ethical grounds. (I only mention this in detail because if you Google Translation's website, you would think it was Coors).

Personally, whatever your views on free beer, hospitality etc (and I will come back to that) what's happening here is that I am being offered money to blog views and opinions about a beer as if they are my own, when they are not. By taking money it becomes advertising, and I am being asked to present it as though it is not advertising - clearly misleading my readers, and being dishonest in my writing.

I would never do that, for three reasons. One - integrity - I have some. Two - career practicality - if I did this, and someone found out that I'd done it, no one would ever trust anything I wrote ever again. My writing career would be over. And three - it is probably illegal. It certainly breaks any general journalistic and blogging standards of behaviour.

To get a clearer picture on this last point, I contacted both the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and the Advertising Standards Authority.

The NUJ admitted that it's still early days for standards in blogging but the rules generally - and there's no reason why they shouldn't cover blogging - are very clear. Writing paid for by a brand should be clearly identifiable as advertising or an advertising feature so the reader understands that it's not under editorial control. The NUJ’s code makes it clear that payments, threats or other inducements should not affect what you write. Chris Frost, Chair of the NUJ Ethics Council, said:

“I’m shocked to hear that a company is trying to bribe a blogger who’s a member of the NUJ to write material that is not necessarily his honest opinion. Whether a journalist is a blogger or works in more traditional media, trust in what they write is central and the NUJ does all it can to protect that with our code of conduct.”

The ASA took a little longer to respond, but I got their reply yesterday. There's a new code, recently extended to cover online advertising. Here's what they had to say about it:

In short, yes, this practice would represent a breach of the CAP Code (marketing communications must make it clear that they are so)... we know that the Office of Fair Trading are also interested in looking into this area, as this type of practice represents a serious breach of consumer legislation.

This last point relates back to a test case last year in which the OFT investigated a company called Handpicked Media who were paying bloggers to write for them. The company was co-operative with the investigation, but it was judged that their activities may be operating in breach of the Consumer Protection From Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, and was engaging in unfair commercial practices. There will be more test cases to establish whether that 'may' actually is an 'is' or not.

But either way, whether this turns out to be technically legal or not, it's morally and ethically wrong. The whole point about blogging is that it is a subjective medium, that writers write from interest and passion. I do write paid for commercial stuff, but I write it in a very different style than I blog, and it's always very clear that I am doing so. I have never taken a penny from anyone for anything on this blog. If other people, who don't get as much paid writing as I do, choose to take money for paid-for ads on their blog that's fine - so long as it's very clear that this is advertising. But what Barry and his agency is suggesting undermines the whole principle and foundation of blogging.

So is this the same as accepting free booze or hospitality from brewers? There are different views on this, but I don't think it is the same at all. Fiona Beckett wrote an article for the Guardian recently about accepting payment for wine reviews, and much of the ensuing discussion was about free samples rather than payment.

I get sent free beer all the time, and it comes down to one's own personal ethics. I've got so much beer, I'm constantly trying to give it away before it goes stale. If someone sends me free beer and I like it, I'll say so. If I don't like it, I probably won't say anything unless the brewer is really insistent. But I certainly won't say I like a beer just because someone has sent me some for free.

Hilariously, earlier this year someone sent me a bottle of a very well-known beer brand, and seemed to think that, having done so, I would of course be including this brand in my Publican's Morning Advertiser rundown of my fifty favourite UK beers. Needless to say, it wasn't there and never will be.

It's trickier with trips/hospitality. If someone takes you on an all-expenses-paid trip around Belgium, it's kind of expected that you'll use the experience to write a piece. It doesn't mean you have to write aglowing report of every beer if you didn't really like it. But if someone shows you a good time, you're more likely to feel warm towards them - that's human nature. I'd like to think that a combination of full disclosure and personal integrity should mean you avoid saying things you don't really believe and misleading your readers.

As for consultancy - I do some of that. But I always tell brewers that while I'm working for them, I won't be writing about them, and I won't be promoting the work we've done together from a journalistic point of view. If I ever do write about it - like I did with the launch of Martson's Fast Cask - I will do so with full disclosure of my relationship, so readers can make up their own minds as to whether they can trust what I'm saying or not.

I know there are some bloggers who would see my standards as too lax, and others who would read this post and say, 'What's the fuss about? If you can get free stuff, take it'. I'm happy to agree to disagree with both, and am not really interested in attacking either.

But I would hope everyone, on every side, would see that taking payment in return for lying to your readers goes against everything that beer blogging is about.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has been approached by Translation. If you have too, I hope you're not tempted - you just might end up being the next legal test case.

Bastards: a cautionary tale

2011-10-11T18:25:00.003+01:00

So, I got my laptop nicked.

If you follow me on Twitter, you'll already be weary of the trials, tribulations and swearing that followed.

I hadn't backed up - I have two separate external hard drives, but both had stopped working. I know I should have backed up online (or in the 'cloud' if we really must) but I never seemed to have time to sort out the best way of doing so.

I was in the Jolly Butchers last Wednesday. I was filming for a TV programme, and after that it was Emma Cole's leaving do. Emma has made the beery reputation of the Butchers, and now she's defecting to the Spotted Dog in Brighton. (Brighton, you are lucky to have her.)

At 6pm I put my laptop bag down beside Emma's chair. At 10.05pm I went back to it, and found the bag thrown under the table, with no laptop in it. I know the timings because I spent the following day watching CCTV footage from two angles, and saw myself do these things.

I also saw a photo shoot to celebrate the Butchers being named 'Beard-friendly pub of the year', and a giant panda emerge from the toilets and go outside. But even though the party table was in the middle of the screen from one of the security cameras, I did not see anyone go under the table, pick up a laptop, or put one in their bag. At no point is the table left empty - there are always at least three people - people who were part of our crowd - sitting down at it. You've got to admit, these bastards are good at what they do.

And I'm stupid. Really, really stupid.

Look at those timings again: I left a very expensive laptop with every single piece of writing I've ever done, all my music, my accounts, all my photos, alone for four hours in a public place. For half that time I was standing outside the pub.

I'm only writing this now as a cautionary tale, because I'm not the only person who is this stupid.

The Jolly Butchers is a lovely pub, one of my locals, and there's rarely a time when at least some friends aren't in it. I feel comfortable there, as comfortable as I do in my home - that's what great pubs are all about.

But without taking away from that, this comfort lulls you into a false sense of security. You extend your trust to cover everyone in the pub. You start behaving as if you are at home. I wasn't the only person to leave my bag unattended that night (I wasn't the only person whose bag was tossed). Every time I'm in this or other pubs, I see bags on backs of chairs with purses and valuables in them. I see phones left on tables when people go to the bar or toilet. I see jackets hanging with wallets in them.

And when I'm out of the pub, I see poster campaigns from the police like the one above, which is currently running all round London.

You never think it will be you - but eventually it is.

As the poster shows, thieves look for the easiest lift they can get. If you make it easy for them - if you INVITE them to take your stuff, as I did - it's hardly surprising if they accept the invitation.

So I'm writing this to everyone who goes in pubs, who loves them, and feels relaxed in them enough to chill out and forget you're in public: don't be the person who makes it easier for thieving bastards than everyone else does. Just keep your stuff with you, and out of sight. It sounds boring. It sounds nannyish. It makes you think of things you'd rather not think of while you're enjoying yourself. But it's absolutely necessary.

Oh yes, and do back up your computer. Religiously. Don't keep putting it off like I did, because shit WILL happen.

Right! Now to start my new book from scratch...

Dank

2011-10-04T08:54:00.001+01:00

I learned a new word while I was over at the Great American Beer Festival. Or rather, I learned a new usage of a word I hadn't really heard for ages.

When I was a kid, we used to buy this really cheap washing up liquid called Sunlight. I can't find a picture now of how it used to look - there's no reason why I should be able to. It was one of those cylindrical white plastic tubes that you willed empty so you could glue Airfix model parts onto and spraypaint silver to make a rocket like they showed you on Blue Peter. Or maybe that was just me.

But anyway.

It had a really cheap artificial lemon smell, and from the pack above I'm guessing that hasn't changed. And we used to have a thick, heavy dishcloth that never got washed or replaced (our house was superficially spotless but some of the detail was well dodgy). This dishcloth was used to wipe down surfaces and clean plates, and after the cleaning was done it was never hung over the tap to dry out; it was just left in a bundle in the bottom of the bowl. And so it acquired a kind of damp smell, but the artificial lemon aroma was so powerful it override the damp smell, and the smell of grease.

This lemon-wet-damp-cloth-grease smell sounds disgusting. But I liked it. I don't know why, I just did. And it's a smell, or a sense memory of one, that I get from some ultra-hoppy IPAs. Just as runny French cheese might be described as 'sweaty socks', or certain aged beers as 'farmyard', divorced from its context - or perhaps even because of it if we're driven by bravado - it's a negative association used to describe an appealing smell. If you've ever heard me describe a beer as smelling of 'wet dishcloth', this is a more detailed description of what I mean.

Over at GABF last week, I heard people describing hop character as 'dank' - this was a new one on me. I wasn't even sure if it was a descriptor or a new hop variety I hadn't heard of. According to my OED, dank means 'unpleasantly damp and cold', and is of Middle English origin, probably from the Swedish word for 'marshy spot'. And the ever-helpful Stan Hieronymous explained to me that it was being used here to describe a full-on West Coast hoppy character, big on citrus - big on everything - and best exemplified by Simcoe hops.

When I sniffed a proffered example, there it was: my old mum's damp, artificial lemon dishcloth smell.

It's probably more than coincidence that US hop freaks have chosen a word that means 'damp' to describe an extreme hop aroma that I associate with an eternally damp, lemon-impregnated dishcloth.

I'm feeling ambivalent about extreme hops at the moment - which I'll write more about in due course - but I'm glad I now have a word to describe one of my favourite extreme hop aromas. I love it - it's a good word, slightly dangerous and a little alienating, and therefore perfect.

The Most Essential Beer Book You Can Buy (apart from any of mine of course)

2011-10-02T17:58:00.000+01:00

The Oxford Companion to Beer is out (well, it is in the US, and it will be in the UK on 27th October).

This book has doubled the weight of my carry-on luggage home

Let's get the quibbles out of the way first: in today's world of forensic pedantry surrounding beer, some people are bound to find errors. Others will take offence at subjective entries. Others still are bound to find glaring omissions, and some bits will have been out of date by the time the book went to press.

It's impossible to capture every single fact, statistic and morsel of wisdom about beer into one book, but this is as close as anyone is going to get.

On Thursday night I attended the contributors' party at the Great American Beer Festival and managed to snaffle a copy.

Obviously, I haven't read it all - that would be silly - but I wanted to give the book a heads up, and give you an impressionistic view of what it's like just from flipping through it.

To give you an idea of how good this book is, I don't normally like reading encyclopaedias about beer, and when I picked it up, I was in a room full of friends I hadn't seen for ages, some who I was meeting in person for the first time, and some people whom I didn't know but wanted to meet. And it was a struggle to get my nose out of the book and say hello to them. You open a page at random and you start reading, and you lose yourself in trivia, history, and bits of brewing science you always wanted to know but never got round to asking.

It's about two and a half years since I was first asked to contribute to the book. I filed my last piece about a year ago. And I was just one of 165 contributors, my 20 just a fraction of the 1100+ entries, which span 920 pages. This gives you an idea of the incredible scale of this project. My own pieces stretch from meaty topics such as IPA, Great Britain (how do you 'do' a whole country and its brewing tradition in 3500 words?) and Prohibition, to shorter entries on subjects like Farson's Lacto Milk Stout, Snakebite, BYOB, Oast Houses and the Quarter (an obscure unit for measuring malt, about which I think my 250 words have probably doubled the amount written).

Opening the book at random, pages 520-521 cover Koningshoeven Brewery, kosher beer, Kostritzer Schwarzbierbrauerei, krausening and kriek. Flipping to pages 358-359, there are two meaty entries on Flanders and flavo(u)r. Pages 426-427 cover heather, hectoliter, hedge hops, hefeweizen and Heineken.

Get the picture? Just about everything any sane person could want to know about beer is in this book, and most of the entries I've dipped in to so far are surprisingly readable for such a weighty, authoritative tome.

The Oxford Companions to wine and food are regarded as peerless and essential by many working in those fields. I'd say the Oxford Companion to beer is the same: if you write about beer, study it or brew it, you simply cannot do without this book. And if you're simply interested enough in beer to be reading this blog, you kinda need it too.

If you don't yet possess any of my three books you should buy them first, obviously. But when you've got them and you're back on Amazon, you simply have to buy this.

Your postman won't thank you, though.

Ten initial observations about the Great American Beer Festival 2011

2011-10-01T16:35:00.001+01:00

1. You've got to love a beer festival where there are touts on constant patrol outside the venue, because tickets sold out after just one week

2. Something has changed. This event is louder, more raucous, more masculine than it was fiveyears ago, last time I was here. Thereare fewer women here than there used to be. The vast hall is a constant roar. I think there might be a link between extreme hops and elevated testosterone.

3. “There’s no margin in having enemies” – John Hickenlooper,Governor of the state of Colorado and former craft brewer, perfectly sums upthe good business sense that drives the spirit of cooperation in craft brewingeverywhere.

4. A sample pour size of 1oz (ie one twentieth of a UK pint) is not enough to really coat thetongue, so it’s impossible to taste any beer properly.

5. After fifteen years, in business, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head is still constantly behind the Dogfish Head stand, still selling his beers personally to a queue offans stretching down the hall, tirelessly greeting everyone who wants to shake his hand, have their photo taken with him, have him sign stuff. You still want to not be impressed by him, to not be taken in by his boyish charisma. But you still are.

6. It’s too busy. Despite the tiny sample pour size, every single beer I’m interested intrying has a huge queue to get those miniscule measures. The size of the measures simply feeds back into making the queues bigger. It’s therefore impossible to get a good taste of a great beer. The system is broken.

7. In general, it reminds me a lot more of the Great BritishBeer Festival than it did when I was last here five years ago. I thinkthis is partly due to the GABF not being quite as good as it once was (see points 2 and 6), but mainly dueto the GBBF being quite a bit better than it once was.

8. Wells & Young’s have relaunched CourageImperial Stout here. Wells & Young’sis often criticised in the UK for having a dull portfolio of beers relative toits competitors. (They rationalised therange of interesting Young’s beers when they took over that range, and they don’tplace as much emphasis on seasonals and limited editions as their keycompetitors do.) Now, they’re reviving a truly legendary beer –but it’s only going to be available in the US. It won't be available in the UK for another year. I have no idea why, in the present British beer climate, any company with such an amazing asset would be so over-cautious with it.

9. There are carpets. And the teeny sample glasses are made of plastic. (All events are a mix of good and bad, swings and roundabouts)

10. There is life after extreme hops. And it's here too. And that's good.

A jolly weekend in Cockermouth (stop sniggering at the back)

2011-09-30T18:36:00.002+01:00

Great weekend last weekend, but I have to slow down and get this damn book written.

After the Social Media Beer Tasting in Glasgow, I went down to the Lake District for Taste Cumbria. They're really doing an awful lot to promote Cumbria as a food and drink destination, and it's working really well.

Friday night I stayed at the Kirkstile Inn just outside Cockermouth, one of those pubs where the thick stone walls, wood fires and silence outside save for the hiss of river and tree lull you to sleep like a baby. Another reason to go there is that it's the brewery tap for the Loweswater Brewery, also known as Cumbrian Legendary Ales. Their Loweswater Gold was named Champion Golden Beer of Britain at this year's Great British Beer Festival, and the only thing better than sinking a few pints of it would be doing so after tramping across some of the irresistible mountains just outside. They were calling to me, I tell you. They just weren't calling as loudly as the comfy seat by the fire, or my bed, or one other very noteworthy beer.

CLA also brew Croglin Vampire.

Completely out of keeping with a range of beers that's very nice but nothing you wouldn't expect from a Cumbrian brewer, Croglin Vampire is an 8% Doppelbock, rich and spiritous, dark and brandy-like, and utterly wonderful. Currently the Kirkstile Inn is about the only place you can get it. Don't worry, it's a worthwhile trip. Just as well they have rooms.

Next day we were off into Cockermouth - yes, Cockermouth - for the festival itself. This is where Jennings Brewery is. Again, the beers are good quality but nothing that you wouldn't expect here. But I love the story of Jennings brewery. I'm not an apologist for big regional brewers - I just have an open mind about them. I find this quite an interesting place to be. When Jennings was bought by Marston's in 2005, the local CAMRA branch shouted that Marston's were going to close the brewery, and continued to shout this even when Marston's invested £250,000 improving the brewery. If Marston's had the slightest intention of closing the brewery, they had the perfect excuse to do so when it flooded in 2009.

Photo: Vanessa Graham on www.visitcumbria.com

But they didn't. They invested millions getting it open again. I don't know if anyone still thinks Marston's are going to close Jennings, but if anyone does think that, I've got some magic beans you might want to buy.

But I digress. On the first day of the festival, Jeff Pickthall and I were doing a beer and food matching event. We're both a bit vague about organisational stuff, and so were Taste Cumbria, so we ended up with about two hours to put some pairing suggestions together from food and beer being exhibited at the festival. Not everyone was keen to have their stuff featured. It was like an episode of the Apprentice. But as people filed into the room, we were just about succeeding in putting plates together for the following:

Mitchell Krause Hefe Weizen with goats cheese from Wardhall Dairy

Hardknott Cueboid with smoked cured boar

Jennings Sneck Lifter with lovely raisin fudge from Duerdens Confectioners of Burnley

Coniston Brewery's Blacksmith ale with an amazing chocolate cake from Ginger Bakers in Ulverston

(We swapped these two around - people were split on what went best)

The aforementioned Croglin Vampire with Parsonby, another cheese from Wardhall which has been rind-washed in The Black Galloway porter from Sulwath brewery. Beer washed cheese is the future, if you like your cheese smelly and overpowering like I do.

Thanks to everyone who agreed to donate stuff for us. Amazingly, despite time constraints, exploding hefe weizen bottles and seventy extra people turning up just when we thought we'd done enough plates of food, it all went rather well, and the matches were ace.

Later, we sampled the delights of Cockermouth nightlife. And encountered the Boogie Bus:

The 'Big Boogie Bus' - does that mean there's a little one somewhere?

As you can see, it's a pink bus that has pole dancers and lap dancers and glowing dance floors inside it. It roams the streets of Cumbria, stopping to lure stag and hen parties on board. Then it glows brightly, drives off, and the stag and hen parties are never seen or heard from again.

Jeff and I decided to pass. Instead we roamed the pubs in search of good beer. And finally, after trying everywhere else, we found Cockermouth's perfect pub, a place I'd be happy to see in any town.

1761 is modern and stylish without trying too hard. It has Guinness, Strongbow and Carlsberg on the pumps because that's what people want. But it also has a good selection of local cask ales, and a small but perfectly formed range of craft beers in bottles including Little Creatures, Orval, Duvel, and Pietra.

There isn't a full kitchen, but they do something I wish more pubs would do - a small, simple tapas menu. We had stuffed jalapeno peppers, a cured meat platter, cheese platter, and some chorizo cooked in wine, which formed a great alternative to the curry and Cobra we were planning on.

I write about 1761 because it deserves to be written about. It's not a fully fledged craft beer pub, but it's a pub with aspirations that understands the needs of its local community, is independent, and friendly. It's not boring like some. It's not too raucous like others. There should be more pubs like it.

The Cask Report: everything you ever wanted to know about cask ale, launches today

2011-09-26T10:14:00.001+01:00

The Cask Report was conceived four years ago to help solve the paradox of the UK cask ale industry: there are few if any national brands, it's a fragmented industry consisting of over 800 brewers with many voices and little internal structure.

This is what appeals about cask ale: its relative lack of corporate bollocks, its regionality and localness.

It's also one of cask ale's biggest weaknesses: no one voice putting a coherent case for the industry as a whole.

So it's brilliant that, despite their differences, CAMRA, SIBA, the key large regional players, the Family Brewers of Britain, and Cask Marque, can come together and agree to jointly issue a keynote industry report. I'm paid by these people to write this report every year, and this is the fifth time we've done it. Of course it's positive, but as an independent writer (who likes cask ale and likes a great deal of other beer as well) I try to keep it objective, accurate and informative, and resist the desire to make it too sales-y.

This year's report is out today and you can download it at www.caskreport.co.uk. It's primarily aimed at publicans who may (or may not) be interested in stocking cask ale, but some of it may be of interest to others who write about beer, or are interested in it.

It's been a really tough year for pubs generally - and cask ale is only available in pubs. The story for the last few year is that cask is in decline, but compared to the decline in the overall beer market, cask's decline is very small. It's been getting smaller every year, but has not quite managed to get back into sustained volume growth. With 25 pubs closing every week, beer duty up by 35% in three years and the total on-trade beer market down by more than 7%, that's not surprising - what is surprising is that cask is doing as well as it is. Here are some positive indicators in a difficult year:

Cask ale drinkers are more than twice as likely to go to the pub regularly as drinkers who don't drink cask ale
The number of cask ale drinkers has fallen overall - but the number of young people drinking it (18-24) has risen for the second year running
This represents a broader recruitment trend - of all people who say they drink cask ale, 10% of them started drinking in the last year. 37% started drinking it in the last ten years. Cask ale drinkers are leaving the market at one end, but they are entering it at the other - a clear sign of the revival of interest in cask ale
2500 more pubs are stocking cask ale this year
Cask ale's share of on-trade beer has increased to 15% - getting on for one in six pints served in the pub

So if it's so good, why isn't volume increasing? Because for most drinkers, cask is an occasional drink within the repertoire. Cask ale drinkers are more curious, experimental, have broader interests, go out more and try new things more than non-cask ale drinkers. This is both a blessing and a curse - it means they're more likely to try cask ale - it also means they're more likely to try other things too.

So the task is to get people to drink more of it, more often. This year, we commissioned some independent qualitative research to find out how publicans might do that - nine focus groups, across the country, probing attitudes to cask ale, and behaviour around it.

The results make for interesting reading. Some of the solutions sound obvious - but if they were, more pubs would already be doing them. I won't go into a full analysis here, but some of the most interesting things for me were:

Only the beer industry and beer geeks debate the merits of micros versus big regional brewers. For most drinkers, the dynamic in the market is about 'familiar' versus 'unfamiliar' beers - it doesn't matter who brews them. Depending on who you are and where you drink, Thornbridge Jaipur could be more familiar than Adnams Bitter. Pubs need a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar brands. If you have, say, three hand pumps, three familiar brands is boring, while three unfamiliar brands is too eclectic (unless you're a specialist craft beer pub, frequented by passionate beer geeks). Most drinkers want to experiment, and then go back to what they know.
The single best way to sell more cask ale is to pre-emptively offer tasters to people who look unsure at the bar. We've been saying this for five years now. It's still the first thing that comes up in research. Yet so few pubs do it.
Another failsafe method - which sounds so obvious - is a chalkboard featuring names, ABV and, if you like, something about taste, style and provenance. At a busy bar people can't scrutinise hand pumps properly and feel pressured into making a quick decision. Often, they'll default to Guinness or lager. A clearly visible chalkboard gives them plenty of time to choose a cask ale
We didn't ask this, people told us: cask ale is natural, flavoursome and 'a little bit cool'. The explosion in the number of new beers available, and the growth in the number of pubs selling them, suggests that cask beer has momentum, and it's becoming generally regarded as cool in an 'old school' way rather than uncool in an 'old fashioned, way.

Those, for me, are the points anyone interested in promoting cask ale should be banging on about. There's plenty more in the main report. I hope you find it interesting and useful.

Social Media Beer Tasting - Tonight! In fact, in about 7 minutes!

2011-09-22T17:54:00.000+01:00

Social media and the world's most sociable drink: and the explosion in beer blogging has shown, the two go together like Worthington White Shield and Keen's cheddar.

This week is world Social Media Week. Real world events across a whole host of subjects are happening in Glasgow, Chicago, Vancouver, Milan, Berlin, LA, Beirut, Bogota, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aries and Moscow, and being broadcast in real time.

Right now I'm at the WEST brewery in Glasgow, which is hosting a social media beer tasting.

I'll be tasting beers and meeting the brewers of WEST, Harviestoun, Magic Rock and Kelburn, tasting their beers and talking to them about their beers, beer generally, social media, and anything else that comes to mind.

It's being filmed and broadcast live, and you can see it here. And if you can't get the same beers as us, get a different beer! We'll also be monitoring the #smwbeer hashtag on Twitter, and unless you're being rude about our personal appearance we'll probably work in some of your tweets to the discussion, in a gigantic virtual feedback loop of beery social medianess.

So open a cold one and come and join us!

UPDATE 28TH SEPT:
Here's the video of the event if anyone wants to relive it!

Watch live streaming video from smw_glasgow2 at livestream.com

Me and Mr Flintoff

2011-08-31T23:58:00.001+01:00

Can I just say, it was him, not me, who insisted on this photo being taken and then tweeted it to his half a million followers.

He describes himself as 'currently unemployed', and gave a strong impression that 'beer writer' would be a good place to go.

Freddie Flintoff: "So how do you get to be a beer writer then?"

Me: "Well I was really shit at sport..."

Thanks to Thwaites for taking me to the cricket, introducing me to Freddie, and blowing me away with an amazing range of limited edition beers that any young buck micro would be proud of.

Elbow: From "Build a Rocket Boys" to "Brew a Beer, Boys"!

2011-08-31T14:00:00.000+01:00

I love the band, Elbow, for a great many reasons. And even though it's the greatest cliche in popular music history, I've loved them since their early stuff.

As a wordsmith, even one of the everyday hack variety, I love Elbow for lyrics such as:

"I'm proud to be the one to hold you when the shakes begin"

"You little sod I love your eyes/be everything to me tonight"

"Grow a fucking heart, love"

"Throw these curtains wide/one day like this a year would see me right"

"We still believe in love, so fuck you"

"Dear friends/you are angels and drunks/you are Magi"

"You were freshly painted angels/walking on walls/stealing booze/and hour long, hungry kisses"

"The violins explode inside me when I meet your eyes/and I'm spinning and I'm falling like a cloud of Starlings.............darling is this love?"

I love them because of their cleverness, their instrumentation, their openness.

I love them because they are five crumpled northern blokes who look like they could be my mates. (And I secretly love the fact that people keep telling me I look a little bit like lead singer Guy Garvey, especially around the saggy, weary eyes).

I love them because Guy Garvey genuinely seems like one of the nicest men in the world (I'd love to see him and Andy Moffat from the Redemption brewery each trying to buy the other a pint - I really wouldn't bet on who would crack first and accept the other's hospitality rather than give it).

I love them because they absolutely reek of the pub. I know they spend their time in pubs, and their music feels like it was born in pubs, it feels like that's where it should be performed, even though it works in vast arenas and on Glastonbury's main stage.

And now I love them because they've brewed their own beer:

The beer itself is not news: it was announced a good few weeks ago now, and is just about to be launched. It'll be officially launching at the Manchester Food and Drink Festival, where I'm attempting to arrange an interview with them about the beer.

What's new is that the beer is now going to be available in bottle, so fans outside the north west can enjoy it. And that a percentage of profits will be donated to Oxfam. Because they're really nice lads.

If I can anticipate the inevitable "Why did they choose such a dull brewer to work with?" comments - Elbow specifically selected Robinsons because they wanted to work with a brewer local to them in the north west. And if I was to imagine what an Elbow beer is like, it's not some flashy, hop-heavy imbalanced beer: an Elbow beer is an accessible, traditional beer, one of those pints you'd have with your dad when you go back home, one of those beers that you can drink a few pints of, is balanced, fruity with a dry finish. And that's exactly the kind of beer Elbow went for. So long as it's done well, there's always a place for it, and Robinsons brew it perfectly well.

There will soon be a website for the beer, telling you where you can get it and stuff.

In the meantime, if you can't get the Build a Rocket Boys! beer, you can still get the Build a Rocket Boys album, and if you haven't done that yet, I suggest you do.

Shameless Self-Promotion

2011-08-25T18:25:00.001+01:00

Shameless plugging: it's a good thing. It's the first reason I started this blog, on my editor's advice. Little did he know what he was setting in motion, but let's get back to basics with a run-through of some events I'm doing over the next few weeks. If the idea of meeting me face to face repulses you, look away now.

This weekend, Ed Davies, ambitious young manager of Kilverts in Hay-on-Wye, is staging his second annual Beer and Literature Festival. Me, Young Dredge and Adrian Tierney-Jones are the beer writers in residence. Tomorrow night I'm doing a beer and food pairing dinner, nicking from John Keeling at Fullers the idea of pairing each course with two contrasting beers to help people explore what matches best. It ended up being Wales vs rest of the world with each course. I'm expecting the Welsh beers will fare better than the football team (after all, you can't finish 117th if there are only handful of countries being featured). Then on Saturday I'm doing my Beer and Book Matching talk, with one or two tweaks from last time. Orwell, Amis, Hamilton, Dickens, Burton ale, lager, porter - but who goes with what? Adrian and Mark will be doing a second beer and food matching dinner on Saturday night, and there are all sorts of other goodies going on, with an impressive array of beers on keg and cask.

Then me and Mr Bill Bradshaw board a plane for the US - we're being looked after by the utterly fabulous North American cider community with what promises to be a thrilling and unforgettable tour of craft cider. As a tiny thank you we offered to do our cider talk (which went down very well in Wales) at the Great Lakes Cider and Perry Festival in St Johns, Michigan on 10th and 11th September. As you might guess, we're quite looking forward to that one. Not sure which day we're on or what time but think the event is on course to sell out, so if you are in the unlikely position of being a reader of this blog who is based near the Great Lakes and enjoys cider, get your ticket quick!

Back in the UK, 17th-18th September it's the Abergavenny Food Festival, which is now firmly established as one of the top food festival in the country, with as many celebrity chefs and chutney stalls as you could ever need. I'm going to be busier than ever this year, with a beer and food matching dinner on the nights of the 16th at the Bell Inn in nearby Glangrwyney, a joint event with Nick Otley on the 17th, where we'll be using Otley beers to showcase a world of beer styles, and a talk on Sunday where me, Ian Marchant and Paul Ewen discuss the enduring appeal of the British pub. I'm excited about all these events, especially the last one - Ian wrote the excellent The Longest Crawl - a book I would have written myself if he hadn't done it first - and Paul is the one-man 'Campaign for Surreal Ale', thanks to his hilariously disturbing book of London Pub Reviews. Three of us in a room together promises to be interesting. I can't link to the events individually but tickets for all of them are available on the festival website.

The following week is Social Media Week, with events happening in various cities around the world linking up in real time. The hub of it all this year is Glasgow, and you know who's in Glasgow? WEST brewery, that's who, the finest and possibly only Germano-Scottish brewery on the planet. On 22nd September from 6-8pm GMT I'll be joining them for a global real time tutored beer tasting, featuring beers from various participating cities including Vancouver, Chicago and Milan. More details as we work them out.

I go straight from Glasgow down to Cockermouth, for the Taste Cumbria Food Festival. Me and Jeff Pickthall will be doing beer and food matching masterclasses and beer trials on Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th, somewhere around Cockermouth.

The week after that, after launching the 2011-2012 Cask Report on Monday 26th September I'm off to the Great American Beer Festival. No events planned for there, but I'm open to offers! Really looking forward to meeting North American friends and readers, many of whom I've become friends with online but have not yet met in person.

When I finally get back to London I'm running a pub quiz at the excellent Snooty Fox in Canonbury on the evening of 6th October. The owners say one of the Pippettes works behind the bar there - it'll be the first time I have ever been start struck by a barmaid.

The next day we're down to Lewes for their Octoberfeast shindig. The Snowdrop Inn is one of the most exquisite pubs I've ever been to, and last year they hosted me for a Hops & Glory reading that was one of the highlights of my year. I'm doing Beer and Book Matching down there this time, on 7th October, and staying overnight so I can find out what Melissa Cole's Scotch Egg event is all about the following afternoon...

And finally (for now) I go straight from there up to the Manchester Food & Drink Festival to host another beer and food dinner on October 9th. I shall be stalking Elbow.

When I finish all that, I have to hibernate to write three books. I probably shan't be surfacing till the New Year. At which point I might have a day or two off. Hope to see you at an event!

First ever International Cider Festival - this weekend in Wales!

2011-08-09T15:29:00.001+01:00

It seems odd writing about drink the day after the city I live in descended into anarchy. But having just got back in after going to help clean up the streets of Hackney a mile down the road, I found a crowd of 500 people had had the same idea, and all of us had been beaten to it by the awesome council street cleaners. We passed burned out cars being taken away, shops with the shutters down unable to clean up until the police had checked the scene, but the streets were clean and showing next to no evidence of rioting.

In other words: extraordinary times. But life goes on, and should go on as normal.

Walking home I felt conflicting emotions: overwhelming pride at being part of a community which is starting to fight back agains thuggery, coupled with an overwhelming desire to get out of town and go to a festival or something.

And then I remembered I'm doing exactly that.

This weekend is the first International Craft Cider Festival, and it's happening in Caerphilly, South Wales, from 12th to 14th August.

I'm particularly intrigued by it because it's a real festival - it's over a weekend, there are various venues, bands playing, and we'll be camping. It looks like it's going to be amazing.

And the other part of it is that it truly is an international festival. I'm currently working on a book about cider with ace photographer Bill Bradshaw, and we're discovering small cider making communities all around the world who are only just starting to realise they're not alone. This is one of the first events in the world that will offer some kind of international perspective, from the Apfelwein culture around Frankfurt to the flamboyant sidra performance pouring of Asturias in northern Spain.

There will be tasting masterclasses on tasting and cooking with cider, three cider bars - England, Wales and International, food and that, and a bustling marketplace.

Oh, and Bill and I will be giving an illustrated talk: 'The Secret Stories of Cider: A journey around the world's most misunderstood drink'. It's going to be an update of where we've got to, the adventures we've had so far. As such, it's an absolutely exclusive opportunity to hear extracts form one of my next books months, if not a year or more, before publication - I've never done this before. But better than that, it'll be illustrated by Bill's wonderful photography, which I'm really not doing justice to here:

There are day and weekend tickets available - day tickets only £10 a day, weekend tix £25. You pay for talks and tastings on top of that, but our talk is a mere £2.50.

Hope to see you there. Looking forward to - well, maybe normality might not turn out to be the right word, but life-affirming, optimistic and joyous - I think they're good words, and we could all do with a bit of them just now.

FINAL Video Blog - It's August. It's GBBF!

2011-08-05T17:27:00.001+01:00

I would say it's been a long twelve months but it only seems like last week that our motley crew assembled in Nottingham for the first time, to talk to last year's Champion Beer of Britain one month on from GBBF 2010.

That's when we began our series of 12 monthly video blogs over the course of the year, financed solely by Peter Amor of Wye Valley Brewery, who wanted to put something back into an industry he felt he'd done rather well out of.

Peter's brief was strictly to champion British real ale, and to address the lack of pride and attention we have for it. Regular readers will know I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by partisanship and the creation of false enemies within the beer world, no matter what side it's on. Single-minded real ale advocates have long been the worst for this, but craft beer snobs are making efforts to catch them up.

But wherever your own beliefs lie, no one can argue that British real ale, while not entirely unique, is one of the most special, individual, eccentric, flavoursome, well crafted beers in the world. It is the only style of beer that can pack in a flavour explosion at 3.8% (excepting beers that are so hop-imbalanced they're undrinkable - and I say that as a hophead). Belgian and American beers are just as wonderful on their day - but they only seem to start being so at around 5% ABV.

If real ale were French, it would no doubt be iron-clad in appellation controlees and EU Protected Designations of Origin. It would be as famous globally - and as celebrated in its homeland - as Bordeaux wine, French cheeses and foie gras. It is a peculiarly English trait to be indifferent or even negative about things we're good at. I've never met a single non-real ale drinker who nevertheless sees our brewing prowess as something to be proud of, and I've met many real ale drinkers who believe it is not.

So even though I get frustrated with Old CAMRA diehards and am personally at least as likely to enjoy an American craft beer or German lager as I am a pint of best bitter, I was proud to be asked to co-present these blogs. We've toured the country, seeing a year of beer first hand, trying many excellent ales and meeting people from brewers large and small who love their craft. Every pub we've drunk in has been of outstanding quality. We've hopefully shown that Britain really should be proud of its beer and its pubs.

This final blog is from GBBF 2011 - edited and finished in time for you to watch it and then go along and try both the beers and the atmosphere. We both use the occasion to make some points we've come to feel strongly about on the journey. And I get to taste some beers that we missed along the way, several of them among my all-time favourite real ales. We didn't get chance to get everywhere in the country, and I'll always regret missing out Yorkshire and, to a slightly lesser extent, Kent and Sussex. But maybe there will be chance of another series.

Anyway - hope you enjoy the blog:

Thanks to Eggy, Kaz and Dave, to Ian for channeling an exasperated primary school teacher as he tried to direct and produce us, and especially to Mr Amor for the funding, the cantankerousness, and most of all the hats and bow ties.

IPA Day: the morning after the night that didn't happen for me

2011-08-05T07:20:00.000+01:00

Oh balls. Was not feeling great yesterday, and by 4pm I really wasn't feeling very well at all. This was no hangover - hangovers get better as the day goes on, not worse. A combination of too much beer, not enough sleep and far too much work combined with some very dodgy chicken wings from GBBF to lay me low. You know when you put something in your mouth and your whole body goes "hang on, this isn't right"? If you're going to GBBF, please avoid the hot wings stall. I spent most of IPA Day in my bathroom, and drank nothing stronger than water.

So I missed the Dean Swift dinner, which I'm very upset about. Here's the menu - read it, and you'll see why I was particularly unhappy not to be there:

Toulouse sausage Scotch egg

with

Keg Kernel Black IPA and Brew Dog AB:06

Calamari with sweet chilli mango sauce and timbale of avocado and crayfish

with

Brew Dog Punk IPA and Maui Big Swell

Goats cheese stuffed peppers

with

Kernel Centennial 100 and Kernel Centennial 2010

Tandoori chicken with a cauliflower veloute

with

Stone Ruination IPA

Lamb Mechoui

with

SWB Kahuna, Magic Rock Cannonball, Stone IPA, Sierra Nevada Torpedo, all on draught

Raspberry and Limoncello Jelly Tartlet

with

Mikkeller Sorachi Ace

I've never seen a beer style put through its paces like that, never seen such an ambitious beer and food matching menu. It would have been amazing. But this week, it would have killed me. I still feel dreadful this morning. Can't imagine how I'd feel if I'd attempted that.

But it does confirm the Dean Swift as one of London's most exciting beer pubs. I hope to eat there as soon as possible. And I hope they'll let me host a beer and food matching event with similar ambition in the near future.

Cheers to International IPA Day

2011-08-04T13:04:00.001+01:00

What a great opportunity to take stock. What a smart use of social media.

Two tweeters decided it might be a nice idea to get the online beer community to have a global celebration of the craft beer world's favourite beer style, and the day was set for today, 4th August.

As far as I can tell there is no central organisational structure, no big budget or organisation, and yet it's an idea that has caught the imaginations of beer lovers and gone global.

So what are we supposed to do? What actually happens? That's up to you. It's up to breweries, pubs and drinkers to organise tastings, drinking, events, whatever really. A quick google search shows that many people across the planet have taken up the challenge.

Why IPA? It's a perfect meme for every aspect of beer appreciation. It's a definable style - even though that definition mutates continually over time. It has a long, deeply chronicled history - and that history has given birth to more myths, mythbusting, speculation, misinterpretation and debate than anything else in beer. It's a perfect showcase for hops - the facet of beer that craft drinkers get most excited about. And it's the style that caught the imagination of the US craft beer movement, that symbolises it. It's the constant across the many styles craft brewers brew, a shop window for their craft. The union of a traditional old-style IPA recipe and the tropical orchard of flavours and aromas bestowed by New World hops lit a fire in craft brewing that's now burning world over.

For me, my first taste of an American IPA was the equivalent of my first taste of a real curry: it was like tasting in colour for the first time, as if everything I'd tasted before was black and white. From there it became an obsession that would profoundly change my life. In 2007 I embarked on a mission to recreate IPA's historic voyage from Burton to India around the Cape of Good Hope for the first time since 1869. My attempt to recreate the effects of the journey was partially successful, as was my attempt to write the most thorough, detailed history of IPA to date. Neither of these partial successes has stopped the arguments, the mythbuilding and busting, the speculation, and that's entirely how it should be.

The resulting book, Hops & Glory, moved me up a big notch in my career, earned me the Beer Writer of the Year gong, and to date represents the best writing I can do. I can never look at IPA the same way again.

Tonight, my contribution to the celebrations is that I'll be tweeting from a 6-course IPA day feast at the Dean Swift, London SE1. It's a lovely little pub run by passionate, knowledgable people, and they've pulled together what looks to be an amazing menu, which I'm not allowed to share. If you want to know how that goes, follow @PeteBrownBeer on Twitter from 7pm UK time.

And raise a glass to the world's most talked about beer style, and the people who have harnessed the power of social media to celebrate it in such a great way.

I promise I will go back ranting and/or trying to be funny after this post.

Perfect Pub Service - how to charm and delight your customers in one easy move

2011-08-01T08:48:00.000+01:00

While in Edinburgh last month filming the latest video blog, I made time to visit the newly opened Brew Dog Bar in the city. We didn't feature it in the Vlog because it doesn't serve any cask beer, and that particular Vlog is about cask beer. But as we were filming on my bleedin' birthday, once we'd finished I hooked up with my old mates Allan and McAlastair and we hit the town.

We ended up here:

I don't think it's ever this quiet

after 11pm, on a Tuesday night, and the place was buzzing, mainly with young, studenty people who seemed more passionate and knowledgable about beer than you might expect.

Brew Dog make headlines, and increasingly piss people off (or simply bore them) the way some people pick their nose. They just can't help it. Like Aesop's scorpion who stung the frog carrying it across the river, it's in their nature. And perhaps the greatest shame about this is that it hides some of the true facts of their operation behind a screen of punk attitude. Because much of what they do is really very good indeed.

The service in Brew Dog Edinburgh was incredible. In parts, it was the best service I've ever seen in a pub or bar.

The main element of this is that if anyone looked hesitant or unsure, or simply paused a beat too long at the bar, the member of staff serving them would pour a small taster into a shot glass and offer it to them. They might ask what kind of beer people like, or they might say, "This is my favourite beer, it's amazing, you've got to try it." Then another member of staff would say, "No, try this one, this is my favourite beer ever and they say they're not going to brew it again. I'm trying to make it sell really quickly so they realise they have to."

The bar was covered in sample glasses. As soon as one person swept them up, they'd start dropping on the bar again as the relentless tide of tasters kept coming. And the money flowed over the bar in the opposite direction.

We've currently putting together the fifth Cask Report. This year, we'll be recommending large programmes of samples and pro-active offering of tasters as the main strategy to overcome various barriers to drinking cask ale. The thing is, we've recommended it every year, and it hasn't happened yet, even though every time we do research asking people why they don't drink real ale, they tell us this would make them drink more. I've mentioned it before on here too. I don't understand why more pubs don't do it more often.

Now here's a bar that does it in spades, does it brilliantly - and is rammed every night of the week with people paying premium prices for interesting beers.

Brew Dog Edinburgh's bar staff are young, hip and good-looking - as you'd expect from a company so concerned about its image. I was quite worried they were going to be a bit too cool for school - not the case. They also happen to be friendly, enthusiastic, and visibly knowledgeable and passionate about beer.

Forget the CAMRA spats, the Portman groups spats, the SIBA spats, the stupidly strong beers and the roadkill. Brew Dog should be getting headlines as a case study in how to hire, train and motivate brilliant bar staff, brilliant ambassadors for beer.

July Video Blog: Scotland!

2011-07-26T08:39:00.000+01:00

I bloody love Scotland, me. I lived there for five years while at university, getting a degree and booking bands in the students' union in St Andrews, going to buy records and get drunk in Edinburgh, going to chill out in the stunning beauty of the Trossachs.

This month I got to reminisce about all this as we attempted to cover the brewing scene of an entire country in about twenty minutes.

Why?

Because this particular series of video blogs is all about cask ale, and from an admittedly low base, cask ale is growing in Scotland at about 30% year on year. When I was at uni there were three types of beer, all from Tennent's, all a bit tasteless and horrible, apart from the ones that tasted of burnt sugar and were horrible. So bad was Scottish beer I switched from being a cask ale drinker to a standard lager drinker. It took me ten years to recover.

It is very, very different now. Brew Dog, who we don't visit here (their Edinburgh bar is all keg, and the man who pays the vlog bills wants to focus on cask) is merely the most visible of Scottish brewers who are currently displaying extraordinary levels of invention and enthusiasm.

In the Guildford Arms in the centre of Edinburgh I find one of my old favourites. Then we go to Caledonian, where Peter looks round one of the most stunning traditional breweries you will ever see. Many in Scotland are unhappy about the takeover of Caledonian by Scottish & Newcastle, and more recently Heineken. Not without justification, there was a feeling that things would be bastardised and cheapened. But I visited before Heineken took over, and now going back again, the unique coppers, the hop room full of whole leaf hops, the open fermenters, the range of beers, are all unchanged. The only real difference is a massive commitment to health and safety, a more corporate head office presence through boards displaying targets for reducing accidents and so on. The brewing process and the resulting beers are unchanged.

I have a chat with Steve Crawley, MD of Heineken, in which we discuss whether the brewery's flagship, Deuchar's IPA, really is 'not as good as it used to be'.

And then we're off to Bridge of Allan, just outside Stirling, where Peter gets a bit tipsy talking to a round table of four brilliant Scottish brewers about the state of brewing in the country: Fergus from Inveralmond, Douglas from Traditional Scottish Ales, Amy from Harviestoun, and Tuggy from Fyne Ales (who I'm currently trying to persuade to adopt me). I review a Scottish Wit Bier, try to sum up the style of stout in under a minute, and by the end we're struggling to do a decent outro. It's hardly surprising.

Next month - next week in fact - we are filming our final video blog of this series at GBBF. If you're there on trade day, come and say hello. If there's anyone you think we should be going to talk to, please shout!

Do women need their own beer?

2011-07-20T08:27:00.002+01:00

Alongside beer styles, craft beer, cask versus keg and other such burning issues, the notion of 'beer for women' reared its head again this week with Molson Coors' launch of Animee, a new attempt to persuade the 79% of British women who don't currently drink beer to start doing so. I was at the launch on Monday night. So was Melissa Cole, who is true to form in her outspoken views on the subject here. Sophie Atherton also weighed in on the Guardian blog here.

I agree with the gist of what both are saying, but not on every single point. I also get a sort of itching in my brain when commenters who have not seen, smelled or tasted these products dismiss them as 'piss'. How do you know? Even when I slag off something like Stella Black, I taste the damn stuff first.

I believe the launch of Animee is misguided and flawed, but there are some good points in there if you look hard enough. I'll sum this up in a list of positives and negatives, to make it easy.

Negative:
The whole idea of a beer for women in the first place. It's never worked, because it's not what's needed. I'm not surprised Melissa feels patronised - I'd feel the same if someone tried to flog me a 'wine for men'. As Melissa points out, women don't want a product that segregates them - they just want a product that doesn't actively alienate them. Wine, cocktails, cider and premium spirits are neither masculine nor feminine, and they all seem to be doing just fine. The only reason beer is overtly masculine is the long heritage of macho advertising in the UK - beer is far more unisex in other countries. In Spain, 40% of total beer volume is drunk by women, and it's mainstream lager, same as here. (Nice mainstream lager though, it has to be said.)

Positive:
The fact that Molson Coors are trying. This was presented on Monday as part of a broader programme of ideas and initiatives to really promote beer across the board. Molson Coors are a big multinational brewer who talk about beer in marketing speak (the subject of another piece). But I get the impression they do actually care about beer. They show signs of understanding it, and respecting it. Growing Sharps and Worthington are as much part of their plan as boosting Carling - which, by the way, also got a shout on Monday night. A new 4.8% 'premium' version, Carling Chrome, is bland, pretty tasteless, but not watery and without the nasty aftertaste some of these beers have. On the beer for women thing, they've spoken to tens of thousands of women and really got to the heart of what's keeping them from beer.

Negative:
Given all that research, I just don't understand Animee as a response to it. The main barriers are all about image - not the product. So why launch a different product? I find the beers that convert women who 'don't like' beer tend to be very strongly flavoured - American IPAs or Imperial porters and stouts - because these women are currently drinking wine that has comparable characteristics. I don't see the need to launch a product that doesn't actually look or taste like beer at all, and don't understand how a product that doesn't look or taste like beer, that has different language around it from beer ('clear filtered', 'lemon' and 'rose' anyone?) is going to attract women to drinking beer more generally. It's actually only beer because Molson Coors say it is - it's not going to change anyone's attitude to what 'beer' is or can be. Any women who drink this will do so despite it being called beer.

Positive:
It might not be beer, but actually I thought the product wasn't bad. It wasn't remotely like beer, but I did enjoy it, especially the clear filtered one. Light and refreshing, it would be a pleasant summer drink, an alternative to mainstream cider. I also think the packaging, if you look at it for what it is, manages to be unisex and quite stylish, a few beers cues here and there, not too girly. I know, I know, it's in clear glass. That is a marketing decision because - and I say this as someone who has done countless focus groups over the last 15 years - every single drinker who is not knowledgable enough about beer to know about light strike says they overwhelmingly prefer clear glass. It just looks better, and for many drinkers, beer is about style over substance. Of course I don't agree with that or like it, but it's true.

So overall, I suspect Animee will go the same way as all other attempts to market a beer specifically for women. But I hope Molson Coors don't give up. I hope they will try some different strategies. And I hope other big brewers will follow their example. I also hope they will read the comments from the many women responding to Melissa's and Sophie's pieces saying there are beers for women, in the shape of cask ale. And I also hope they will look very closely at this:

Project Venus is a collaboration between female brewers. On 28th July, Kathy Britton, of Oldershaw Brewery, Sara Barton of Brewster's, Michelle Kelsall from Offbeat Brewery, Sophie de Ronde from Brentwood Brewing Company and Sue Hayward from The Waen Brewery will gather at Oldershaw's to brew their second cask ale. The whole thing will be filmed by Marverine Cole, AKA Beer Beauty.

Of course Project Venus is tiny compared to Animee. But I'd be fascinated to see a side-by-side tasting of the two, and see which women prefer.

China, crap ads, good pubs and Depeche Mode - my recent trade press rants

2011-07-11T08:31:00.001+01:00

I'm very chuffed to have secured two regular trade press columns this year: a fortnightly one in the newly merged Publican's Morning Advertiser, now the only magazine for the UK pub trade, and a monthly one for www.Just-Drinks.com , the website for the global drinks industry.

Both these columns appear online and each time they do, I put a link to them on Twitter. But not everyone reads Twitter, so here's a brief summary of what I've been writing about recently, which you can read if you like. They're quite industry focused, but then, you might be too. You don't have to read them if you're not. You don't have to read them at all.

[Update: It seems Just Drinks might require a subscription to read. PMA definitely doesn't].

I kicked off in Just Drinks by talking about what's gone wrong with beer advertising, and why brewers want to make bogus claims for their products.

Next month, I wrote about the beer scene in China, and how Western brewers need to be careful setting up shop there.

After that, prompted by a Carlsberg relaunch, I wrote about why beer is different from other products if you're trying to build global brands.

And last month, I railed against the dodgy practice by some brewers (well, one in particular) whereby if you're an employee of the company, drinking someone else's beer - even if you're off the clock and on your own time - can be "a career-ending move".

My latest rant - familiar to any long-term readers of this blog - will be about the factual fallacies of the neo-prohibitionists, and how the drinks industry is failing to combat them. It should be up any day now.

Over at the PMA, concerns are a bit more UK-focused, and there's room to occasionally be a touch more irreverent. Not all my columns are available online but they've started putting them up over the last couple of months. In the first one that's up there, written just before the first UK beer bloggers conference, I tried to explain to the British pub industry why they need social media.

Following that, I wrote about the basic quality of pubs, and what hardcore beer drinkers really mean when they describe a pub as 'the kind of place you could bring the wife'.

Next, I had a go at PubCo M&B for their ludicrous decision to boot out the tenants of the wildly successful Engineer in Primrose Hill, and also used it to say something about the way many of us approach issues in beer and pubs.

And then, I wrote a piece I really hope no one takes seriously - you never know - about the glory that is Tallinn's Depeche Mode bar.

Finally, the PMA also asked me to compile my 50 favourite UK beers - that was the brief, so I was unable to include foreign beers. I attempted to go as wide as possible, and include selections that would upset - sorry, delight - as many people as possible.

Hope there's something you enjoy. If there's anything, global or local, you think I should be covering in these columns, please drop me a line.

Craft Beer and US-Russian Relations

2011-07-06T13:40:00.000+01:00

I went drinking strong beer with Russians last night.

Don't do this. It's not a good idea if you fancy living. They look at high ABVs and laugh contemptuously, necking them almost scornfully.

I was meeting Eugene Tolstov, Moscow's number one home brewer, and Russian beer blogger. Eugene looked after me in St Petersburg, and is in the UK three of four times a year with his day job, so I was happy to return the favour. Eugene was happy to demolish beers the rest of us might be a little bit scared of.

We were in the newly opened Craft Beer Co in Leather Lane, Clerkenwell, London, EC1. It's a truly great place, and many other bloggers were there for the opening night last week - I know Young Mark has already covered it. I counted 42 taps on the bar, about half of these being cask ale (which, as we all know, is a form of craft beer, so let's not get started). The cask ales are a reasonable (for London) £3.40ish, while the taps carry beers rarely, if ever seen in the UK on draught, so they're a bit more expensive.

"Excuse me, have you got any beer?"
"Yes sir, this is a craft beer pub, not a Monty Python sketch"

What I liked about it though is that it still feels like a pub, a proper London boozer. The glass ceiling is stunning, the roman numerals remembering the gaff's previous spit-and-sawdusty days as The Clockhouse.

I was with one old Clockhouse regular who was complaining about the high price of beers such as Struise Old Albert (13%ABV), or Mikkeller's nonsensically named but wonderful 1000IBU, being sold at four or five quid a half, until I pointed out this would be quite reasonable if you were looking at wine - and rare wine at that.

The Russians were gamely attempting to chug their way through the entire range when in walked a legend, an immortal, a god in little bald beardy man-shaped form. Ladies and gentlemen, White House communications chief Mr Toby Ziegler! In a pub! In London! OK, not the real White House Comms chief, the one in West Wing, which is even better than the real thing in all respects. And not him of course, because he doesn't really exist, but the actor who plays him, Mr Richard Schiff. But Still. Toby Ziegler!

I need to say now that, depending on your point of view, I was either too chicken or too sane to rush up to him and take a photo, or have my photo taken with him. I wish I had been more courageous/sad. In the end, I only got this photo of him when he was leaving. But I promise you that is the back of his greying bald head:

"Yes, Mr President"

You can tell by the confident, authoritative way he looks up manfully at the brooding sky.

And here is from the front, in The West Wing, in one of the rare scenes that doesn't have people walking up and down corridors talking extremely quickly:

See? You can tell.

Before he left, he spent a long time tasting samples of various different craft beers before ordering pints of a blonde one, a brown one and a dark one for himself and his posse. I wasn't close enough to him to ascertain whether or not he ordered by starting a sentence very-quietly-and-quickly-and-suddenly-gathered-pace-before-finishing with an OUTBURST OF MORALLY OUTRAGED SHOUTING!

But the best was yet to come. As he got his beers, he glanced across the bar at me - or rather in front of me - and saw that I was eating one of the Craft Beer Co's bloody excellent pork pies. I saw him mouth the words, "Hey what's that? I'll have one of those too." TOBY ZIEGLER SAW ME EATING A PORK PIE AND THEN HE ORDERED ONE AS WELL!

Apart from now having the best lame claim to fame I've ever had, some gnawing self-doubt at the fact that a better (or worse) man than I would be sitting here today posting a photo of himself with his arm around Richard Schiff, raising our beer glasses to the camera, I'm just happy that one of the coolest guys in one of the coolest TV series ever is a craft beer (and pork pie) fan. And if Craft Beer Co wasn't cool enough for you before, it is now.

I tried explaining how cool all this was to the Russians. You'll be amazed to hear they don't really get the West Wing.

But here we were: the former mortal enemies of the Cold War, brought together by craft beer. It was a beautiful moment. Even if the Russians had no idea what was going on, and Richard Schiff remains forever ignorant of the meeting that never quite took place.

June Video Blog: Celebrating the Great British Summer in Cornwall!

2011-06-30T14:25:00.000+01:00

So last month we were sitting in Norfolk, in the sun, worrying about how the lack of rain was affecting the local barley crop.

Ah well, we thought, at least if it's like this, we'll have a great time in Cornwall next month - sun, sea, sand, seafood and a nice golden ale on the beach.

I didn't realise we were planning on doing this the same weekend as Glastonbury and Wimbledon.

It was freezing cold, rainy, windy and unpleasant. Of course it was. I returned from the Baltic the day before, and there was no difference.

Never mind. We got to have a look around St Austell brewery. I've been a huge fan of Tribute ever since I went to Portland, Oregon in 2004, and learned that brewer Roger Ryman was in a sort of cultural exchange with the brewer at Portland's Bridgeport brewery. Roger was teaching the Yanks about cask ale, and they were showing him the secrets of American hops. Many readers probably don't think of St Austell Tribute as a particularly hoppy beer, but ten years ago there were few beers like it in the UK. It accounts for 75% of the brewery's output, and has become a nationally recognised brand.

If you like Tribute, you'll love Proper Job, a beer that truly cuts the mustard as a 'proper' IPA. In this moth's style guide, we take a 60 second look at probably the most argued over beer style the world has ever seen.

Then we're off down to Falmouth, in search of all that sun and seafood. We settle instead for a few beers in the Front, recently named Pub of the Year by Kernow CAMRA. It should be obvious why form the video, in which we try beers from Skinners, Chough and Tintagel breweries.

Next month we finally make it to Edinburgh, where we'll be looking at the Caledonian Brewery and seeing why Scotland is the fastest growing cask ale region in the UK.

And after that, our final Vlog will be from the trade day of GBBF. If you're going, bring along your 'Hello Mum' signs. And whether you're going or not, if you think there's any particular aspect of British cask ale we should be looking at there, let me know.

Surviving the Great Baltic Adventure

2011-06-27T09:35:00.001+01:00

Yes, I know it's the middle of the summer - that's why it's daylight at 11pm. But this is the Baltic Sea. On a good day.

Life is never boring.

Following the absolute exhaustion of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, I’d like to say it seemed like a great idea to join the Great Baltic Adventure, sailing to St Petersburg with fourteen casks of Russian Imperial Stout. Except it didn’t – it felt like a really stupid idea.

And it was.

Like my last big sea adventure, we weren’t long into it before my wife wanted to divorce me. Not because I was away from her this time, but because she was on the ship with me. We were ill equipped and under-prepared, yearning for sleep and running on fumes.

Two weeks later, Liz declares it the best holiday she’s ever had (despite the entirely fictitious account on her Beer Widow blog of how it came about) and we’re both in some kind of wonderful sensory overload phase where flushing toilets and hot baths give us all-over intense pleasure, where after two weeks of listening only to waves, wind and engine noise has made music in my headphones feels more intense and beautiful than it ever has, and yet part of each of us is still on the ship, still swaying, still squinting at the horizon, still sharing inanities, UHT-milk flavoured tea and endless Custard Creams with the ragged, wasted bunch of beery eccentrics we now call close friends.

“Father” Tim O’Rourke is my new beer hero. When I pissed off to India with Barry the Barrel, it was one man’s search for a book idea that could trump the previous one. Tim, while inspired by Hops and Glory, has managed to achieve something much greater, something that turned into a trade mission for British beer and a quirky news story that repeatedly captured the imagination of the BBC - here and here - and various other media outlets.

If you saw me standing in a Russian brewery wearing a tri-corner hat, looking greasy and smelly, I apologise. If you heard Tim and me on the Today programme, I hope we sounded not too mad.

Between us, we have a great deal to say about the effects of sea-aging on beer. I’ve got more to say about Russian Imperial Stout in general, as well as Finnish Sahti, Russian Kvass, the Baltika Brewery, Finnish microbrewers, why you should go and drink in Tallinn, or if not then at least the Red Bull in Histon, Cambridgeshire, and why there’s no people like boat people like no people I know.

From Sting personally trying to ruin my life, to watching films about dogs turning into men while deep in conversation with Russia’s first Belgian microbrewer, to face-offs with pathetic gangsters driving ancient Ladas (or ‘cab drivers’ as the Russians call them) to the case for Disturbingly Random Theme Bars, to why it can be handy to view British ale as others see it – it’s not a book. It’s not a coherent article or single blog post. I don't know what it is yet. I’ll try to make sense of it and present the best bits in the most appropriate and interesting way over the next couple of weeks.

Till then – would anyone like a Custard Cream?*

Good night.

*Sorry – on this score I think you probably had to be there.

Off up the Baltic

2011-06-11T11:10:00.000+01:00

Writing this from a Helsinki hotel room: endless days, Mediterranean temperatures and six quid pints.

Hope the boat is bigger than this one

I blogged in March about the harebrained scheme that's been hatched to take casks of Imperial Russian Stout from London to St Petersburg by boat. I won't repeat the overall idea here - if you didn't catch it, check out the link.

In mid-May, pins of each beer were tapped in Woolwich, South London, and I was one of a dozen or so people to take part in a blind tasting of them. Beer style purists would have disappeared in a twisted spiral of smoke at the extraordinary diversity of beers all supposedly brewed to the same quite distinct style. There were some awful ones, some OK ones and some fabulous ones. Some of the latter were from the people you would expect, others were surprising (it was supposed to be blind - I made a note of what they were afterwards). I'm not going to go into more detail now, because I want to wait until we taste them in St Petersburg and compare the effect of the journey.

So after four weeks the ship, containing more pins of each beer, has travelled from St Petersburg as far as Helsinki. Thermopylae, her crew and a bunch of ragged beer eccentrics all entered port yesterday, while the Beer Widow and I landed at the airport late last night in the 10pm sunshine. We all meet up today.

We set sail for St Pete's early tomorrow morning. For most of next week I'll be out of email and phone contact so apologies for any unanswered messages or blog comments that go unpublished (I have to keep comment moderation on because of the immense volume of spam - I'll check up whenever I have a signal).

I'll try to blog from St Pete's about how it all goes- y'all behave now!

Confused cognitive pathways and books and beer

2011-06-10T23:03:00.002+01:00

Synaesthesia – it’s one of my favourite words.

According to Wikipedia, it’s “a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway”. So seeing colours might evoke sounds, you might ‘taste’ texture, and so on.

Since I learned of it, I’d tell myself I had it. And recently, doing a bit of research, I discovered I do have a particular strain. Since an early age, I’ve always thought that numbers have personalities – 6 is a bit hysterical, 7 cool and aloof, 5 friendly and garrulous, 2 cool and elegant, 9 a bit sly, and so on. I also visualise dates, years, and days of the week three-dimensionally, on curved lines. I’d always thought this was entirely normal. Turns out it’s all a variant of synaesthesia known as ‘ordinal linguistic personification’. So there you go.

But I think we all have a yearning for cross-neural pathways. Information from one sense can fit – or not fit – with information from another sense to create a more or less pleasant holistic sensory experience.

Everyone who has ever put a soundtrack to a movie, chosen music for a pub, restaurant or dinner party, decided they prefer the feel of a book in their hands to the theoretical convenience of a Kindle, or played the Withnail and I drinking game has, at some level, matched different sensory stimulation to create a more pleasing experience.

So while beer and food matching is being extensively promoted by beer writers and brewers, you can also match beer with music, films, books, anything really. I wrote a few years ago about how research at Herriott Watt discovered that different styles of music actually changed the enjoyment of wine that was drunk while it was being played.

You can take words that apply to experiences in any sense – music, pictures, flavour, texture – and whether it’s complex, loud, light, spritzy, heavy, dark or whatever, they go well together.

But on another level, it’s just a bit of fun – a ruse to get some interesting beers in front of people who may otherwise be unaware of them or choose not to drink them.

The success of this ruse was borne out at my first proper ‘beer and book matching’ talk, last Sunday as part of the Beer Widow’s Stoke Newington Literary Festival. The sell-out audience (OK, it was a small venue) was one of the most mixed I’ve ever spoken to, about 50-50 men and women, mostly unfamiliar with my writing, mostly unfamiliar with the beers I’d chosen. It worked really well, taking the beer conversation into completely new territory and making porter fans out of at least two steadfast red wine drinkers.

I didn’t have time to go out into the wider field of literature and match non-beer related novels thematically or tonally, but I hope to do some of that in future. All the following are beer or pub related and simply provide a platform to talk about some good beers, while showing in a different way how important beer and pubs are to society, and to our collective imagination.

Hops and Glory with Curious Brew IPA

Obvious starting point – the reason I came up with this idea is that I’ve been half-jokingly calling readings/tastings of my beer trilogy ‘beer and book matching’. I used the title here, then realised people were probably expecting something more. And H&G led in a very convoluted way to StokeyLitFest happening – it was while I was touring the book round literary festivals in 2009 with the Beer Widow at my side that she had the inspiration for the event.

I read bits that showed what she’d had to put up with when I made the journey, and tasted a restrained but flavourful IPA from the folk who make Chapel Down Wines.

The Flying Inn by GK Chesterton with Brentwood Summer Virgin

Chesterton is one of my favourite writers, a total polymath whose ideas and language feel totally relevant today. A century ago, he wrote “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” This struck me as having some resonance with the whole CAMRA vs Blogeratti debate.

But that wasn’t why I chose him. The Flying Inn is the story of a slimy, devious, PR-savvy Prime Minister trying to kill pubs and usher in prohibition via the back door. It seems to have a particular contemporary relevance.

It’s a charming read, a pastoral ramble down English country lanes, across fields and through copses. (No one talks about copses any more. Where have all the copses gone?) As such, I felt it needed a golden ale, a beer that evoked summer evening and birdsong. Brentwood, an Essex brewer, were very generous in response to a Twitter plea and supplied me with Summer Virgin, their first brew, which won the Chelmsford Summer Beer Festival in 2007 and fit the bill perfectly.

London Fields by Martin Amis with Brew Dog Avery Brown Dredge

On one level, Amis and Brew Dog feel like a perfect match: undeniable brilliance, undeniable arrogance, they piss off a lot of people, but even those people have to admit that on their day, few can match them.

I love Keith Talent, the lager-drinking, darts-obsessed protagonist of London Fields. This is easily Amis’ best work. Even though he can’t help sneering at the stupid poor people in down-at-heel boozers, frustratingly he captures something true and timeless about those boozers. And Keith’s defence of lager – “It’s kegged, innit? You know what you’re getting. Kegged,” meant I simply had to read it now.

ABD is a lager I hope Keith would have liked. It’s still tasting bloody marvellous. It combines the brute power of Keith ‘The Finisher’ with the elegance and mystery of his obsession, the beguiling Nicola Six. Shit, I should probably have said that on Sunday.

‘Neath the Mask by John M East with Curious Brew Porter

Long story – this is a biography of an actor by his grandson – also an actor. The family had a long association with the George Inn in Southwark, subject of my next book. This biog has some great material about the George, especially its association with Charles Dickens, who was a regular porter drinker in the pub. And there’s a punchline to this particular luvvie biog that I’m going to have to keep under wraps till I’ve got it right in the book. Another showing for Curious Brew – their beers are really rather good, if you don’t believe a beer has to tear up the rulebook to be good.

Honourable mention: Westerham Little Scotney Pale Ale

I recently featured this beer in my 50 best British beers in the Morning Advertiser. I love it because it’s one of those beers that’s hoppy without being HOPPY, structured, refined and friendly. Westerham’s offered to send me some beer for the tasting. In the middle of festival chaos I was told it had arrived. Three hours before my event I was looking for it, couldn’t find it. The following day it turned up, unopened, behind one of the festival bars. Guys, I promise I will make good, literary use of it.

So, I think I’ll take this format out on the road – just as soon as I’ve ironed out some of the kinks such as Chesterton’s casual racism and Amis’ tongue twisters, and perhaps broadened the repertoire.

What do you think?

CAMRA. Shotgun. Foot. Again.

2011-05-30T09:59:00.009+01:00

So CAMRA have been inventing new enemies again.

Zythophile informs us that, according to chairman Colin Valentine, beer bloggers hate CAMRA, hate cask ale and wish everyone would just drink keg beer. We have no respect for history and can't even define our beloved 'craft beer' properly.

What's set Colin off is the growing contention that keg beer has changed over the last forty years, and that some brewers who create amazing cask beers now also produce amazing keg beers. In Colin's strange little world, the fact that one has some carbonation and the other doesn't makes the one with carbonation evil. Some bubbles make, say, keg Camden Pale or Punk IPA more similar to Watneys Red than to their respective cask versions. And if we tolerate them, we'll all suddenly want to drink really shit keg beer again.

"What's Brewing, Mr Ludd?"

CAMRA chairpersons have form when it comes to creating imaginary enemies on which to vent their spleen and look tough. One of my first ever blog posts saw me first try out my ranting style when Col's predecessor, Paula Waters, thought it would be a good idea to use the one occasion when CAMRA has the ear of the national press to suggest that lager drinkers who might be curious about trying real ale were not welcome at the 2006 Great British Beer Festival.

But I'm not going to rant here. I don't need to. As I tweeted over the weekend, it's far more damning simply to draw attention to what these people say.

It's just such a shame that when CAMRA is doing so much good, the chairperson - of all people - publicly says something that takes it back to the dark ages, that deliberately antagonises people who are by and large on the same side - people who are in total agreement when it comes to CAMRA's stated aim: "CAMRA promotes good-quality [sic] real ale and pubs, as well as acting as the consumer's champion in relation to the UK and European beer and drinks industry".

The fact that as one of the more visible of those nasty bloggers who has argued passionately for good quality keg ale, I also write the annual Cask Report which has been credited with doing quite a bit to spread cask ale in pubs, is something which seemingly does not compute in this paranoid, binary 'us and them' world. For Colin and for Roger Protz - who has also recently attacked 'noisome bloggers' for daring to suggest that, after having largely achieved its aim in saving real ale, after forty years CAMRA might just be able to, y'know, evolve to take account of the fact that it's not 1971 any more - we don't want to encourage CAMRA to evolve; we want to destroy it and all it has achieved.

I really am not interested in going over the same old "the clue is in the name, idiot" arguments. Instead, I want to make one observation.

Over the last four years, while I've been doing the Cask Report, I've spent a great deal of time reviewing research on the reasons why more people don't drink more real ale more often. Some of the most important pieces of research have been done with CAMRA. We work very well together.

The main barriers to cask ale - according to the people who don't drink it, or drink it only occasionally, are as follows:

Lack of knowledge - people simply don't know where to start
Lack of confidence - linked to the above, not knowing what to order. People regularly say that if samples were offered, they would try them. The irony is that those who already know real ale are perfectly comfortable asking for samples; those who really need to try samples are not.
Lack of a reason - they're perfectly happy with what they're already drinking. (To them, lager is not horrible 'chemical fizz', and you're not going to convince them it is by telling them they have no taste. And wine is a perfect drink when you want flavour, complexity, sophistication, and something to match with food.) For most people, while many of the stigmas around real ale have disappeared, there's nothing about it that makes them think they have to try it. It lacks the social currency and image values that would make it a cool choice at the bar. (Remember, this doesn't apply for everyone - just the vast majority of people who don't drink it).
Issues around quality - it's inconsistent, and a bad pint can put off a novice for life
Image - from some. It's important to distinguish between two negative stereotypes here. The geeky, socks and sandals image of real ale does not exist for mainstream non-drinkers - it's only people who go to beer festivals already who worry about this stereotype. But the other negative stereotype - which happens to be completely untrue when you look at the stats - is that it's a drink for old men with flat caps and whippets. In the words of one focus group respondent, drinking real ale on a night out is not going to help you pull.

He's actually far more likely to be drinking John Smiths Smoothflow, you know.

Those are the main barriers to "promoting good quality real ale" in pubs. CAMRA know this - they are an active and vital part of the coalition that directs me to write the Cask Report, and some of this is from their own research. So you'd think that these would be the issues that CAMRA would devote most of its time to addressing.

Instead, an admittedly unscientific trawl of press releases, online chatter, articles and speeches by people like Rog and Col, suggests that in many of their most visible interactions with the public, CAMRA mouthpieces spend most of their time addressing the following:

Cask breathers are bad - thou shalt not put a blanket of CO2 on top of thy beer to extend its life
Keg ale is bad - bubbles are dangerous
Lager is horrible chemical fizz - i.e., it's bad
The tie operated by large PubCos is bad
Not being served a full pint of beer is bad
Big brewers of real ale buying smaller brewers of real ale is bad
Pretty much anything that's not 'traditional' (whatever that means) is probably bad

Now let me be the first to point out that beer festivals, particularly the Great British Beer Festival, the Good Beer Guide, campaigns like Mild Month and so on, do a great deal to promote cask ale in a really positive way. A lot of what the professional arm of the Campaign for Real Ale does is excellent. And there are one or two of the issues above that I actually agree with!

But I'm suggesting that what the campaigning arm of CAMRA talks about most is parochial, uninteresting to 95% of beer drinkers, and does nothing - absolutely nothing - to address what CAMRA knows are the biggest barriers to achieving its stated aim.

I've never heard CAMRA calling for a widespread campaign to give samplers out to novice drinkers. I've never seen them effectively trying to address the image issue (please, no one even try to suggest the horrible 'pint head' thing does anything other than damage real ale's image further.) In terms of education, one might argue the Cyclops scheme addresses this - except I've just been involved with two separate research projects among real ale drinkers and not one person in 15 focus groups across the UK has ever seen it.

MISSING: Have you seen this beer rating scheme?

Keg versus cask, cask breathers etc are of deep, passionate interest to the most committed, active, vocal CAMRA members. They're of no interest whatsoever to the average beer drinker - the potential real ale drinker.

Those advocating that CAMRA might consider evolving to reflect the reality of the modern beer scene do so because they recognise that CAMRA has a vital role to play in the promotion of good beer. We do so because we recognise that setting up a 'campaign for good keg beer' entirely misses the point - it makes issues of dispense method and carbonation when these are NOT the issues, and it formalises an antagonistic relationship between two factions of people who are equally passionate about great tasting beer. I don't want to bring up the Judean People's Popular Front again, but seriously, can you not see the parallels?

Whenever I or anyone else says anything like this, the same thing always happens. Many CAMRA members write to say they agree with me. One or two, Tandleman being the main example, usually disagree with me but do so in a way that is based on rational argument, engaging with the issues raised and challenging my view of things in a reasonable, constructive manner. But the people with the loudest voices and the biggest potential to engage in constructive debate shy away from direct argument, retreat to their heartland and make tub-thumping speeches at conferences and in What's Brewing where they seem genuinely offended and outraged that these newly-imagined enemies of CAMRA even DARE to suggest such heresies, because if CAMRA were to, I dunno, allow Meantime keg beers or Freedom lagers to be sold with gas at beer festivals, before you know it we would all be zombies drinking Watney's Red - itself miraculously back from the dead.

These two beers are EXACTLY the same. Can you not SEE that?

Guys - you are doing your campaign - and real ale - a grave disservice. I know you'll never agree with me, but can you not at least see that in making this post, I'm not attacking real ale?

Most beer bloggers are passionate real ale advocates - it's just that we, like the public, judge a beer on how it's made and how it tastes rather than how it's served. And for that, Chairman Col et al think we are the enemy.

The irony is that thanks to his hostile, knee-jerk approach, with this constant paranoid focus on the wrong targets, keg-drinking bloggers like Mark Dredge, Zythophile and RabidBarFly do more to usefully, truly promote real ale to new converts than someone like Colin Valentine ever will.

May Vlog: East Anglia

2011-05-25T16:59:00.000+01:00

I think we're quite slick in a rather chilled out way on our latest Vlog.

Peter Amor takes his bow-tie to Elgoods, a brewery like you have truly never seen before, that's over 200 years old. The young whippersnappers who took it over are now in their fifth generation, and there's a lovely laid-back feel to Peter's brewery chat.

I got to go to the Fat Cat in Norwich. Norwich is a bit out of the way so the Fat Cat doesn't get talked about in the same breathless terms as North Bar, Rake, Cask & Kitchen, Sheffield Tap etc, but it's been doing the same thing as those places for much longer - 20 years this year to be exact. Thirty cask ales on at any one time, and over 50 bottled craft beers from around the world. How can they get the throughput they need to keep so many casks on? Well, despite being in a sleepy Norwich suburb, it's packed - all the time. We were filming on a Thursday mid-afternoon and it felt like a Friday night. A truly great pub, worth braving even East Anglia Trains for.

Next month we're going to Cornwall to visit St Austell brewery. If you think there's a pub as good as the last ones we've been to in the vicinity, let me know!

Stoke Newington Literary Festival gets its own exclusive beers - got a name for them?

2011-05-23T09:27:00.000+01:00

"Who cares how time advances? I am drinking ale today." 
Edgar Allan Poe (Former Stoke Newington resident)

Last year my wife Liz, AKA the redoubtable Beer Widow, created the first ever Stoke Newington Literary Festival. Somehow, it worked, and it was a truly great event, so this year it's happening again, from 3rd to 5th June. The line up includes ex-Bond villain Steven Berkoff, Johann Hari, Alexei Sayle, Jon Ronson, Howard Marks, Matt Thorne, Dan Cruikshank, Stella Duffy, Rowland Rivron, BBC 6 Music’s Shaun Keaveny, and of course a nepotistic beer and book matching talk from me. You can get more details and buy tickets for all events from here.

Like last year, I've been putting together 'Pete's Bar' featuring a range of tastefully selected drinks donated by very wonderful sponsors including Budvar, Quilmes, Thornbridge and Hendrick's gin. But this year we also have two unique beers thanks to our local brewers.

Redemption Brewery in Tottenham, just up the road from the festival, has created and brewed a summer ale that will be sold in the festival’s own bars as well as at The Jolly Butchers, another collaborator on the project. Meanwhile, Brodies in East London has created a seven-hopped spectacular to offer festivalgoers a choice of unique local brews. These beers will only be sold in Stoke Newington during the festival. Liz even went along and helped brew one of them, with Emma from JBs:

L-R: Nice Andy from Redemption, The Wife, Emma, Beer Queen of the Butchers, pretending to read book. Really drinking beer.

Today, we're launching a competition to come up with a linked pair of names for these two sibling beers from different breweries - one light and refreshing, the other hoppier and bigger in flavour, both gorgeous, both perfect to accompany a summer's weekend spent feeding your brain.

Andy at Redemption, James at Brodies, Emma at The Jolly Butchers and I will judge the names and award a host of beer and literature-inspired prizes, including 2 free tickets to my Beer & Book Matching event on Sunday 5th June, the chance to pull (and drink) the first few pints and signed copies of my Beer Trilogy: Man Walks into a Pub, Three Sheets to the Wind and Hops & Glory.

Suggestions should be sent to info@stokenewingtonliteraryfestival.com, @Stokeylitfest on Twitter, or via the festival's Facebook page, where you can also receive updates about the festival and other beer sponsors. Competition closes 5pm on Friday 27th May.

Bombardier Beer Writing Competition winning entry: The Stonemason's Tale

2011-05-10T14:04:00.000+01:00

Not much time to blog at the moment - sorry about that. Too much paid writing (although there's never too much paid writing) and helping the Beer Widow organise this year's Stoke Newington Literary Festival.

Biggest apology goes to the Milton Crawford, winner of the Oxford Brookes/Bombardier Beer Writing Competition. I announced that he was the winner a month ago, and haven't yet published his excellent winning piece, so I must do so now.

There are two reasons for the delay: about 75% of the blame is for me because I'm too busy and disorganised. 25% is because I was waiting to see if we could get the essay published first in a national newspaper or magazine. Charles Campion was looking after this. He's infinitely more well-connected than I am, way more charming and much more respected. Yet even he met with a brick wall when trying to persuade people to publish something about beer. One food and drink magazine even went so far as to say, "We like it, it's a very well written piece, but we do not publish features on beer, we just do wine." How a food and drink magazine can say this categorically about any food and drink - how it can be not just an attitude or preference, but a publishing policy decision - is beyond me. But that rant is for another post.

I'm proud that I can publish here a piece of writing you can't see in the national press - they don't deserve it.

Congrats again, Milton.

THE STONEMASON’S STORY

By Milton Crawford

‘You’re drinking that like water,’ I said with a laugh as I stood at the bar and watched my friend George glug the top half of his deep auburn pint in one indulgent guzzle. A shaft of low sunlight caught his glass as it reached the horizontal in front of his mouth. There was a flash of red and gold. I watched his throat work hard, swallowing the liquid in rhythmical gulps, before he placed his glass down on the bar with emphasis and gave a long gasp of satisfaction. The liquid in the glass slopped about slightly like a gentle swell in the English Channel on a serene summer’s day.

‘It’s funny you should say that,’ he said, once he had sucked some air into his lungs. ‘A friend of mine was remarking just the other day how in medieval times every man in this country drank beer instead of water because the water could not be trusted. I knew that already, in fact, but what surprised me was the amount that they drank.’

He wiped the back of his hand across his brow and swept his long blonde ringlets from his forehead. His hair was damp and darkened around his temples as he tucked the dry ringlets behind his ears. It was the first really warm day of the year and as the sun dipped and cast long shadows across the stone-flagged floor, and the air outside began to cool slightly, it remained warm and sticky inside our village pub. There was a hum of conversation from around the low-ceilinged room and the cries of playing children and barking dogs shimmered in on the warm air. George placed his large, rough hands on the edge of the bar and leaned his weight slightly against them as though he was trying to move the bar backwards an inch or two. He was a stonemason with powerful arms and shoulders and I believed that if he tried he probably could move the bar if he really wanted to. The landlord – a tall, slim fellow with a long neck and glasses – leaned his right forearm on top of the pumps and listened. George liked to tell a story.

‘A man would be drinking beer from when he woke in the morning to when he went to bed at night. He’d have half-a-pint for breakfast, a couple of pints through the morning, three or four in the afternoon, when he was hot from working, and then, in the evening, another three or four with his friends.’

‘Sounds like old Roger,’ chimed in the landlord with a chuckle, ‘he’d be in ‘ere every day for a breakfast pint if I let him in.’

George looked directly into the sun and took another gulp from his glass.

‘Nine pints,’ he said, turning to us again with his face that looked like it too had been roughly chiselled from stone. ‘That was what the average medieval man drank every day of his life. I suppose that would be quite weak ale, but you must admit, that’s a fair amount of beer. When my friend told me that, I tried to think what the life of a stonemason might have been like in the middle ages. I certainly wouldn’t fancy cutting stone – and especially not lifting it – after a few pints.

‘I often think of those times when I’m on the marshes at the edge of the village and I gaze across to the city. The cathedral spire is staggering to us now. But just think what it must have been like to the people who lived when it was built. Those people would only have seen one or two storey buildings their whole lives, and then this spire – this one-hundred and twenty-metre pinnacle of stone – pierces the sky and aims up to heaven like an enormous javelin. Can you imagine how awestruck those people must have been?

‘The main body of the cathedral took thirty-eight years to build. That’s a man’s entire working life now and back then, by the time he’d finished, he wouldn’t just be ready to retire, he’d be just about ready to die!’

George laughed and lifted his glass once more, draining it entirely.

‘You fancy another?’ he asked me.

I supped up.

‘I’ll get these,’ I said. The landlord soundlessly picked up our glasses and pulled back on the hand pump. I heard the ale hit the bottom of the glass and froth slightly.

‘Imagine if I had been told,’ continued George, ‘when I was an apprentice in my late teens, that I would be working on the same building for my entire life. I’d be about halfway through it right now. Of course, you’d be proud of playing a part in such a towering achievement as a cathedral, but I’m glad I have the variety of work that I do. You see, there’s plenty of differences between how people lived then and how they live now; a lot of similarities, too, but a lot more differences.’

The two fresh pints were served to us and we both took greedy mouthfuls of the cool ale.

‘One of the main differences, I think,’ George said, ‘is that there was more of what you’d call a community then. For one thing, people didn’t have cars or much other form of transport. They couldn’t drive off somewhere when they felt like it. They were stuck in their village and they had to get along with the people who lived around them. There was also no such thing as television or cinema or radio or the internet. What did people have for entertainment? Each other, of course; and beer!

‘When I imagine how the villagers worked back then, I think of how the fields would have been full of people having to dig the earth by hand. All the time they would have talked to each other as they worked. At the site of the cathedral there would have been hundreds of them working together with no mechanical noise other than the sound of hammers and chisels. The stonemasons would have been chiselling and chatting away at the same time. Conversation gets drowned out these days. On building sites there is the constant din of machinery. In the fields, there is no need for lots of people, because the farmer has his tractor and chemicals to do all the work for him. Instead of talking to each other we turn on the TV. We call people our “friends” on the internet but they’re people we haven’t seen or spoken to for twenty years.

‘But there are still places that you can go to feel part of a community. I’m not a religious man but I’ve heard that church-goers live longer because they have the feeling of belonging. “Churches are social glue” someone said to me once. Well, I like to think the same of pubs and I reckon someone should do a study on the positive health effects of going to the pub. All you hear about is bad things about drinking but for me the pub is the only place I can go to tell a story and hear other people tell stories. It gives me an opportunity for companionship. It’s a place where I feel the warmth of my fellow men – and women – rather than watching on the news about another murder or atrocity or war.

‘For this reason I say that beer is as essential to me as water. But it’s not really the beer itself. Of course I love drinking, but I value above that the social element of going to the pub. Human beings need all kinds of nourishment. We need food, sleep and shelter. But we also need to feel part of something that is bigger than us. We scoff at the middle ages. We laugh at how ignorant and filthy the people must have been then. But just think: that cathedral is still standing and how many buildings that are being built now will still be standing in eight hundred years’ time? We can learn a lot from them if we stop and think about it a little.’

‘Like how to drink nine pints every day?’ asked the landlord.

‘Well,’ said George, with a poker-face, ‘at least I can feel happy when I leave here, having drunk four or five, maybe, that I’ve got a comfortable bed to lie in whereas medieval man probably had to drink nine pints just so he could get to sleep on his straw mattress!’

The landlord laughed and George smiled once more. And as the dying sun sent its red-orange glow through the stone mullioned windows of the pub for the final time, his face was illuminated and looked to me at that instant like a westward facing sea cliff when the sun seems to falter slightly, then finally dips below the horizon.

April Vlog: Burnley and Moorhouses

2011-04-27T09:23:00.000+01:00

Our wayward ramble through the UK continues, and this month we hit the north west.

Why?

Because Lancashire Brewer Moorhouses has spent over £4m on a staggering expansion with a brand new brewery that increases their capacity by a ridiculous amount. A confident investment for the future? That's an understatement. Moorhouses MD takes a clearly jealous Peter Amor around the brewery, showing him where the money went. As the most ambitious micros grow to the level of small regional breweries, some shrewd business people clearly believe the revival of interest in good beer is here to stay.

Then we go to Burnley town centre. I have a strange relationship with Burnley because it's in the north, has a crap football team and sounds a bit like Barnsley, so people often think I come from there, because I come from Barnsley, which is in the north, has a crap football team and sounds a bit like Burnley.

Anyway, I wish Barnsley had a pub as good as the Bridge Bierhuis (which is in Burnley). If it did, I might not have left town as soon as I was able.

In various publications as well as this blog, I've written quite a bit over the last 12 months about 'craft beer pubs' - often moribund or failed pub sites that have reopened or repurposed themselves with a single-minded emphasis on interesting beer - real ale and otherwise. One criticism that's been fired back is that these fancy establishments might work well in That London, or maybe Leeds, but you can't expect people in northern provincial towns to enjoy microbrewed cask ales, imported Belgian beers and German lagers. The Bierhuis proves them wrong, by doing something quite rare - it combines being a beer shrine with being an excellent and important community Local.

I say all this in the video, actually - but I say more besides, so please give it a view and let us know what you think.

Next month: Scotland.

Exclusive: Wanted - New Brewer For One of World's Best Beers

2011-04-27T08:58:00.001+01:00

Perfection

If you love beer, and think you're a good brewer, this is like Masterchef and Pop Idol rolled into one.

Steve Wellington, Jedi Master Brewer of Worthington White Shield, is looking for a new Padawan.

White Shield has long been a legendary, semi-mythical beer, with a hardcore of devotees sighing wistfully at its very name, a few others going "Dunno, can't see what all the fuss is about,"and a vast majority in the middle saying, "White Shield? Is that still around?" or "White who? Never seen it."

For me, it's one of the best beers in the world. It traces an unbroken lineage back to the 1830s as one of the genuine IPAs brewed in Burton on Trent and sold in Calcutta. When I was researching Hops and Glory I found records of it being imported to the Calcutta docks. It was dwarfed in size by Bass and Allsopps. but did steady business. Allsopp's is no more, and Bass is in trouble. White Shield has certainly had its ups and downs, almost disappeared after brewing was contracted out from Burton, but was rescued and revived by Steve about a decade ago. Since then, it's won Champion Bottled Beer of Britain and Steve has been named Brewer of the Year.

But all this was happening on a tiny, ancient three-barrel museum plant, that looked lovely, had a personality of its own, but was showing her age.

That's why, at a time when most UK macro brewers were disinvesting in ale, Molson Coors took the relatively enlightened step of giving Steve a brand new, state-of-the-art £1m brewery to play with in the newly reopened National Brewery Centre in Burton. The macro has seen that there is a future in ale and decided to take a bit of an interest.

The new plant has been operational since the start of the year. So far, the only thing Molson Coors have done wrong with the new William Worthington Brewery is let marketing have the final say on the names of the new beers that come out of the plant alongside White Shield. Marketing has misunderstood the brand and declared that every beer has to have 'Shield' in its name. So the first seasonal is called 'Spring Shield'. Nice beer, silly name - the master brand is William Worthington, guys.

Anyway, within a few months the new brewery was working at capacity, and today Molson Coors will announce that it brewed more beer in the first quarter of 2011 than the old girl did in the whole of 2010. So successful is it, they will also be announcing the search for a new brewer to work with Steve and his fellow brewer Jo White. It's a dream job: one of Britain's oldest and most revered brands, on one of Britain's most modern and advanced small breweries.

Interested brewers should visit http://molsoncoors.com/en/People.aspx for more details.

So I drank some Stella Cidre...

2011-04-25T10:10:00.000+01:00

It's here...

Analytics suggest that my post ridiculing AB-Inbev's launch of Stella Cidre is the most popular thing I've written on this blog in 2011 so far. Long time readers will know that among the multinational brewers, I reserve particular ire for AB-Inbev because their relentless focus on cost-cutting is destroying some once decent brands, and because they keep bringing out new 'innovations' that are nothing of the sort.

It was therefore with a hint of nervousness that I spied Stuart Macfarlane across the room at the annual Publican Awards a couple of weeks ago. Stuart and I used to work together, but with the piss-taking I've subjected him to on here recently, I wondered if we were in for a bout of fisticuffs. Especially when, the second he saw me, he got up from his table and made a beeline straight towards me...

We had a good conversation. Stuart's actions suggest that he is not passionate about beer itself, but you only have to be in the same room as him to realise he is certainly passionate about the brands he's responsible for. (I would argue that you cannot be truly passionate about beer brands if you're not passionate about the beer itself, but that's a whole other blog post.) He reads this and other blogs regularly, and he doesn't like the criticism.

"Well just make better beer then!" I hear you scream in frustration. But in the strange world of multinational brands, it's not as simple as that.

Once we'd established that I wasn't simply criticising AB-Inbev because they were big, but specifically because of their actions, Stuart challenged me to try some Stella Cidra. I said I didn't have a problem doing so, because at the end of my blog post on it, I did say that when I saw it I would try it, and that if it was nice, I would say so. I'm not pushing agendas here - if it's a good product, I have no reason for saying it's not.

Fair play to Stuart, at lunch time the next day, there was a knock at the door and a case of Stella Cidre, with a note from Stuart saying how much he'd enjoyed our chat.

Stuart asked me to judge the product against its peers - "the two big yellow ones" as he described them - and one quality 'premium' cider. I chose Aspalls, because I like it, and because it's probably the first 'premium' cider many Magners/Bulmers drinkers would see/try.

Mmmm...

If you're a craft cider purist, look away now - you're going to say it's not cider because it's not 100% apple juice, and that at least three of these four brands are tasteless abominations. I'm not about to say anything that will convince you otherwise.

But I'm fairly relaxed about cider. On a hot day, I like a pint of Aspalls or Addlestones, I LOVE Badger's Applewood cider made for them by Thatchers. Not because it's layered and complex and structured - it's not. But because it has a moussy mouthfeel and a clean, dry crispness, with just a hint of satisfying tart tingle, that's refreshing without the bloating gassiness of lager. I'll even happily drink a bottle of Magner's over ice if I'm in the right mood and the wrong pub. So I'm not judging Cidre by the standards of farmhouse cider - there's no point.

Side by side then:

These are poured in the same order as the bottles above. You can see that in terms of colour, Stella Cidre has gone toe-to-toe with Magner's and tried to match it exactly. Bulmer's is more lager coloured, which is interesting - looking more for that lager-cider pint crossover I guess - while Aspall's resembles a glass of white wine.

I should also point out that, according to the labels, Stella Cidre is made from 50% apple juice. Not much if you're a purist, but significantly above the 35% minimum you must now have if you want to call your product cider. Aspall's is made from 100% apple juice. Neither Bulmer's nor Magner's disclose this information on their labels.

None of them apart from Aspall's really had much of an aroma - although this may be due to the temperature.

Bulmer's was simply a monotone, a fizzy, flavourless thing that, if served truly blind, you would simply have no way of guessing was a cider. No apple taste or character whatsoever. Not unpleasant at all - you'd have to find fizzy water unpleasant to be able to say that - just...nothing.

So Stella Cidre then: after the vacuum of Bulmers, there's a bit more of a fruity flavour up front here, followed by an acidity that makes my mouth water. A bit of a chemical hint, and then, nothing. It's amazing how quickly it disappears, leaving you unsure whether you've drunk it at all. Again, not unpleasant - I think - but odd.

Magner's has more discernible apple aroma, a bit more of that moussy mouthfeel - Stella was more watery - less fruit, a little more of that tartness, and a slightly longer finish. It's very similar, but fits together a little better and leaves you more certain that you've just had some cider.

Finally, Aspall's was quite different. It clearly tasted of apples, had a nice aroma, was more structured and had a long, dry finish.

Stella Cidre - judged by the standards relevant to it and its competitors - is not a bad product. It's certainly nothing like the abomination that is Stella Black. Both in appearance and flavour profile it seems to be trying to match Magner's. The interesting thing is that people perceive Magner's and Bulmer's to be the same thing, and they're quite different, as this tasting shows. I might have a Stella Cidre instead of a Magner's if Magner's wasn't around. But Magner's would remain my first choice - it has the edge in terms of aroma and overall product delivery, and just feels slightly better made. Stella Cidre strikes me as being a little bit like the monsters from this weekend's Doctor Who - as soon as you're not looking at them any more, you forget you ever saw them. As soon as Stella Cidre is no longer in your mouth, you forget you've drunk it.

I believe it will do well where it's sold, and people in the mainstream cider market will like it.

The product, then, is not a disaster.

But.

The marketing launched last week as well. The image at the top of this blog is one of the posters currently up everywhere. I won't offer my own comment on this, I'll just share a response to it from a more creatively minded friend of mine:

Beer 'not appropriate' for Royal Wedding

2011-04-24T10:46:00.006+01:00

Yesterday's papers ran with the story that beer has been banned from the Royal Wedding.

Said one 'insider':

"There won't be any beer. Let's face it, it isn't really an appropriate drink to be serving in the Queen's presence at such an occasion.

"It was always their intention to give their guests a sophisticated experience and they have chosen the food and drink with this in mind."

What a shameful, depressing, snobbish, bigoted, blinkered, rude, clueless, cruel, idiotic thing to say.

You might just have been able to dismiss this as a faux pas - you can't and shouldn't force anyone to drink what they don't want, and this could just be an unthinking oversight in a wedding where every single choice of decoration, clothing, dinner service and music is being analysed and dissected to discover it's meaning and symbolism.

Except this is no oversight - that use of the word 'inappropriate' shows that this is a deliberate, calculated snub. It would not be 'appropriate' to have beer served in the Queen's presence. The very presence of beer - any beer - would be offensive to her royal sensibility.

And so Britain's national drink - the thing for which Britain is best known after the royals themselves - is barred from the wedding of Britain's future monarch.

(Also, needless to say, the 'sophisticated' wines being served will not include some of the many excellent British wines available today).

In part this just shows up the royal family as the overprivileged and out of touch twits we already know them to be. But it also shows up the populist impression of the relative worth of different drinks. Despite all the progress we've accomplished in beer look more interesting, classy and worthy of serious gastronomic consideration, the mainstream image is still that it is boorish and not to be taken seriously.

Past generations of royals went to Burton-on-Trent and 'brewed' special beers to commemorate events such as royal weddings. Not this lot. What can we expect when, last year, a visibly disinterested Princess Anne turned up to open the new National Brewing Centre in Burton and made a speech to the assembled throng about how she didn't like beer.

Even Prince Charles' own beer, sold under the Duchy Originals brand, is apparently good enough for him to make a fat profit from, but not good enough to supply to his son's wedding.

The royal family has stuck two fingers up to one of the last remaining manufacturing industries in their kingdom, especially to the plethora of breweries who have created special commemorative beers for the big day (yes, they're cashing in, but they're also wishing the royal couple well).

Particularly given that £1 of every pint sold in the UK consists of duty and VAT, which goes to the public purse, which is in turn paying for the event, the contempt shown by the royals towards their subjects, their economy, and the icons and traditions of their kingdom, is sickening.

So. If beer is not good enough for the royal wedding, I suggest the royal wedding is not good enough for beer. I urge brewers to rebadge their royal beers with republican designs. I urge pubs not to show the royal wedding, and to advertise themselves as royal wedding-free zones.

I also urge the BBPA to make a formal protest to the royal family using some of the points I have made above, if not the same language, and to issue a press release condemning this shameful contempt for beer.

Go to the pub on Friday. Celebrate the free day off. But don't show one ounce of support for these beer hating snobs.

Britain still refusing to drink itself to death - despite media insisting it is

2011-04-20T10:14:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago various shitty newspapers picked up on the shocking rise in binge drinking among women. Curiously, none of them seem to have picked up on the latter clarification that this isn't actually true.

Last time I discussed ONS figures on drinking, I pointed out that in 2006 the number of units in a glass of wine was changed to reflect the growing trend to larger glasses. I had no problem with this change in calculation because it's true that on average we're drinking from larger glasses, so the definition of 'a glass' of wine needs to keep pace with this.

But it did create an apparent huge one-off jump in alcohol consumption, particularly among women. However, this was NOT an increase in drinking - it was a change in methodology. It meant that the figures in the years before the recalculation should probably have been higher, and meant that any figures coming after the change could not be compared directly to those before the recalculation to give any kind of accurate trend. At the time, the ONS said: "“It should be noted, however, that changing the way in which alcohol consumption estimates are derived [in 2006] does not in itself reflect a real change in drinking among the adult population.”

Get that? That's the ONS saying it - the people who compile the figures.

Consumption was on a downward trend before this recalculation. After the jump caused by the change in calculation, it resumed this downward trend. In other words - let me spell this out as clearly as I can, because it seems to be a difficult thing to understand - THE OFFICIAL ONS FIGURES SHOW THAT ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION/BINGE DRINKING IS IN LONG TERM DECLINE.

So why in March 2011 does the ONS then issue a press release that states: “The percentage of females consuming more than the weekly recommended units of alcohol has increased by a fifth since 1998”?

Is this true? Or did they forget the change in their own methodology that they themselves were previously so keen to point out, in order to ensure people read the figures correctly?

The answer is: yes, they forgot to take account of their own methodology change, which led to them releasing a false story about alcohol consumption to an anti-alcohol national press!

They did at least have the decency to point this out, reissuing the press release with a clarification on the front page that reads:

Corrections have been made to reported trends in alcohol consumption in this article, published on 31 March 2011. The errors are unrelated to estimates of output, inputs and productivity.

In Annex C, figure C.5 illustrated trends in alcohol consumption from 1998 to 2009, using estimates from the General Lifestyle Survey (ONS 2010), but omitted references to a change in the estimation methodology in 2006. The change means that trends over the whole period do not necessarily reflect changes in drinking habits.

Accordingly, explanatory footnotes have been added to figure C.5 and paragraphs C.2.7 to C.2.10 in Annex C. References to alcohol consumption in the main article (Table 4.2) and the News Release have also been amended.

ONS apologises for any inconvenience caused.

According to the Liberal Conspiracy blog, the ONS has apologised to the Portman Group for the error.

According to the Straight Statistics blog, which helpfully found this little clarification for us, the Portman Group wrote to the Daily Mail and pointed out this error, but the Mail has refused to print this correction to a factually inaccurate story they ran, and is no longer accepting comments on the online version.

I wonder why?

The Telegraph story is also still up online and uncorrected.

A special prize goes to anyone who can find a single UK media outlet clarifying the story with the correct data.

Thanks to Jeff Pickthall and to Dave Boyle for alerting me to this gem.

O-Lordy - caught on the hop(s) in the Welsh Valleys

2011-04-19T08:20:00.000+01:00

Last Thursday in Pontypridd, the early summer seemed to have revealed itself as a false start. A chill mist hung over the peaks and dulled the valleys. The sombre mood was enhanced when I got off the train at the wrong stop, forcing Nick Otley to come looking for me on a hillside industrial estate he'd never been to before.

When he finally found me and took me back to the other industrial estate back up near Pontypridd - the one where the Otley brewery is - my first impression was that Otley will soon need a bigger unit, if not to expand their brewing operations, then to get a bigger office for all the framed awards certificates. If they carry on winning stuff at the rate they have since opening shop in 2005, they'll run out of wall space this year.

I'm not the first beer writer to brew at Otley - not by any means. I would have been higher up the list if I'd got my shit together when they first invited me to brew, but since then Melissa Cole, Adrian Tierney-Jones and Roger Protz have all been asked to come down and get their hands dirty - Glyn from the Rake, AKA @RabidBarFly, was here before any of us - his Motley Brew has become a regular addition to the range.

The trend of collaborative brewing is an exciting one, but I think, dear reader, you could be forgiven for getting more excited about, say, a collaborative brew between Thornbridge and Brooklyn, or Brew Dog and Mikkeller, than one between a thrilling new brewery and a beer writer whose only experience at brewing before has been a kit from Boots in 1981.

I've been asked to brew before - several times. But on most of those occasions 'brewing' meant I dug out the mash tun and basically got in the way. The notable exception would, of course, be Avery Brown Dredge - and my write up of that experience is long overdue - but Zak and Mark had much more to do with both the recipe design and the labour than I did.

Like our ABD experience, Otley ask writers to get stuck in. Not just the symbolic digging out of the mash tun, but designing the recipe, choosing ingredients and really taking responsibility for how it's going to turn out. Go brew with Otley, and there's nowhere to hide.

The pressure was on. I'd previously talked to Nick about brewing a big old Imperial stout, because when he first asked me to come and brew - at the end of 2009 - I'd only ever brewed IPAs, and was - not bored exactly - but wanted to spread my brewing horizons.

Funnily enough, inspiration came when we were sitting in Brew Dog, about to brew our Imperious Stout, weeping with hangover. (The Brew Dog bar in Aberdeen is great - but almost every beer is one you want to have at the end of the evening. The End therefore goes on for hours.) I was sitting there, feeling guilty at not having contributed more to ABD, thinking, what will I do at Otley? And Martin Dickie, Brewing Boy Genius, handed me a nice cup of life-saving tea and popped a packet of ginger biscuits on the table. I looked at the packet of ginger biscuits. The packet of ginger biscuits looked at me.

And I thought, Imperial stout brewed with ginger, maybe a bot of chocolate, aged in whisky or rum casks.

Otley have so far resisted the cask ageing trend. This was to be their first attempt. The easiest casks to get were Welsh Penderyn whisky casks - and they weren't easy to get. So that's what we're ageing the beer in. It'll be ready late Autumn.

A man with a camera came, which I hadn't expected. I didn't have my entourage, make-up or anything. But, I reasoned, I never have an entourage or make-up, so it makes no difference. So I hastily improvised a quick description of what and how we were brewing. I insist all errors in describing the brewing process are down to necessary editing, but I think Wales Online did a really nice job here. They turned up just after we'd finished mashing in, so I'm covered in malt flour. I'm also pitifully knackered. But it's come out OK.

After we finished brewing, I had several pints of ATJ's excellent Saison Obscura down at the Bunch of Grapes, and even though I was falling asleep from mid-afternoon onwards, the beer somehow galvanised me into giving a competent account of myself during the evening's entertainments, when I matched various beers with each of my three books for an audience bussed into the brewery. The smell of chocolate filled the air by the time they arrived. I think they enjoyed the multi-sensory beer experience.

Introducing "Shakespeare's Local" - my next book!

2011-04-12T20:55:00.000+01:00

The George Inn, Southwark, Late nineteenth century

So, at the end of last week, my agent shook hands on a very nice offer from the wonderful Pan Macmillan for my follow-up to the Beer Trilogy!

It's been four years now since I signed the deal on my last book, Hops & Glory. That’s so long ago, I had only written three entries on this blog at the time, and most current UK beer blogs were still twinkles in a beer geek’s eye.

For the past two years I've been trying to develop ideas that move on a little from beer. After three books that look at history, travel and complete obsession, I’ve done all I can in book form for the time being – or at least, the kind of books I write.

I have no intention of stopping or even slowing down in beer journalism and blogging, and there may also be other books – more conventional style drinks books – in the offing. But all the ideas I’ve had for narrative, story-driven, personal journey type books in beer feel like they subscribe to the law of diminishing returns. If I ever reach the stage where tens of thousands of people are prepared to buy a book just because it has my name on the cover, I'll definitely revisit various ideas for more epic beer journeys, but at the moment there's simply not a big enough market to justify the expense and time commitment they require.

So after the epic travel of the last two books, I wanted to do something that would keep me closer to home - but that's still grand in scope in its own way. I’d also like to do a book where I don't spend the entire advance - and more - on plane tickets and boat voyages. And finally, I wanted to do something that could extend my growing interest in social history beyond beer, but still keep one foot firmly in the pub.

To tick all these boxes, my editor has been urging me for months to write a very detailed social history of one pub, through the ages, and everyone who drank in it, everything that's happened to it. Fine, but what pub?

The answer hit us just before Christmas - and has been taking shape since then.

The George Inn in Southwark, south London, is London’s last remaining galleried coaching inn – one of the few left in the country. The current building has stood there since 1686, when it was rebuilt after fire. The inn dates back before then at least to 1452, and probably earlier. Its vast network was once home to the hop trade from Kent up to London.

For centuries, when London Bridge was the only river crossing into the city, the gates were locked at night, so travellers to and from the south would set off from and arrive at Southwark. By Hewnry VIII's time Borough High Street was one long line of inns. The Tabard – Chaucer’s start point for the Canterbury Tales – was right next door. Neighbouring on the other side was the White Hart, mentioned by Shakespeare in Henry VI, and featuring heavily in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. Dickens was also a regular at the George, and mentions it by name in Little Dorritt. And Shakespeare - who lived just down the road for a few years – almost certainly performed plays in the inn-yard before the Globe was built.

So you have the three great cornerstones of the English literary canon in or near the pub. But more than that, the constancy of the George as everything around it has changed (none of the other twenty-odd Southwark inns now survives) makes it the perfect vehicle to look at six centuries of social history. As you stand on the ancient wooden balconies now, you can see London’s latest phallus, the Shard, rising up in front if you. And that kind of freaks me out. When Dickens wrote about this place 175 years ago this year, he was already being nostalgic about it. Imagine that!

Imagine all the people who have drunk here – not just Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, Dwight D Eisenhower, Princess Margaret, Gary Cooper and other Hollywood stars who made a special pilgrimage, not just the long gone society of London ale conners who used to bless the new season’s ale here, not just the Thespians who staged Shakespeare plays in the inn-yard all the way up to the 1970s, or the ghost of the old landlady who haunts the upper floors. Imagine all the ordinary market traders, hop merchants, bear baiters, prostitutes from the nearby Southwark ‘stews’, clergymen, highwaymen, theatre goers, waggoners, gentlemen and rogues who’ve passed their time in this building. What did they eat? Drink? Wear? Talk about?

That’s the pitch.

I’m writing it intensively through the rest of 2011, hoping for a release in 2012, in time for the Olympics.

And hopefully, it won’t be the only book I’ll be working on! But more on that later, if my other project, in collaboration with a very talented photographer, also comes off.

Anyway, if the blogging slips, that’s why. If you want me, I’ll probably be in the Southwark Local History library.

Bombardier Beer Writing Prize - ladies and gentlemen, the winner!

2011-04-11T23:20:00.000+01:00

At the beginning of March I announced a major new beer writing competition, for which I'd been asked to be a judge.

The incredibly generous £2000 prize offered by Wells & Young's certainly did the trick - we had 42 entries by the time entries closed just over a week ago, giving us a huge judging task over one weekend, ready for the winner to be announced last Friday during the Oxford Literary Festival.

We managed it, but the short timescale and weight of entries meant we were less than professional about announcing the winner publicly, for which I apologise. It's the first year of the competition. Hopefully it will happen again, and the learning will make it more efficient next time.

There were two things I really liked about judging this: one, the prize attracted some very established beer writers, and some people I've never heard before. Two, I only found out who these entrants were after the prize was awarded. An independent administrator processed the entries, and posted them out to the judges with the names removed - my fellow judges and I had no idea who we were reading. Everyone was on a level playing field, and we were only able to find out who had written the ones we enjoyed after we'd made our decision (though I admit some stylistic tics gave me a clue here and there).

Having never judged a writing competition until recently, this is the third I've done in a year. In all three, the pattern is the same: one or two rubbish entries, a lot that are competent, interesting but quite similar to each other, and a few that really stand out and make me very happy as a reader, quite jealous as a writer.

The brief this time, as summed up by my fellow judge, food and drink writer and telly pundit Charles Campion, was to sum up "the joys and jolliness of beer". The judges were looking for something that was lyrical, positive, optimistic - something that, if published in a national newspaper, was actually capable of forcing non-beer drinkers to re-evaluate the most sociable drink in the world.

(Speaking personally, and definitely NOT for the other three judges, essays that began by slagging off beers the author thought were inferior, before moving on to those they liked, kind of missed the point.)

The majority fell in to two camps: personal journeys of awakening to beer appreciation and the incredible role beer has played in the author's life, and/or historical treatises on the cultural role of beer. There's nothing wrong with either approach, but the sheer volume of entries meant that all the entries that simply did one or both of these well were hard to differentiate from each other.

A few stood out - a grasp of language, an interesting construct, a mastery of storytelling, maybe even an original perspective - seven or eight - and I hope we're able to publish all of them, somewhere, in due course. The eventual winner was the best of these.

For his essay, 'The Stonemason's Tale', the winner was Milton Crawford.

Milton may not be a familiar name in the world of beer writing (especially as it's a pseudonym - no, not for an established beer blogger or writer) but he achieved a measure of critical and commercial success last year for the Hungover Cookbook, praised on both sides of the Atlantic, and paired rather unfortunately on Amazon with some unpleasant corkscrews designed to look like little men with massive curly metal cocks.

Milton's entry showed that he can write lyrical as well as laxative, and it genuinely moved all the judges.

We're still hoping to publish it somewhere more noteworthy than this blog... but I'll save the tales of appalling newspaper idiocy and disgusting snobbery for another post.

This competition was the first salvo from Oxford Brookes (home of Oxford Gastronomica and the national brewing library), Wells & Young's, and celebrity patron Charles Campion, to attempt to create a more positive image of beer in the UK. (With occasional involvement from me, and Mike from Utobeer.)

There are much bigger plans in the works, subject to sponsorship that is starting to look more definite than hypothetical. All competition entrants will be contacted by the judges and, with your permission, kept informed of future developments. It's early days yet, so if you feel like you should know about it, but don't, that's only because there hasn't been anything to tell you so far. But stay tuned - hopefully this could lead to something.

Wikio beer and wine blog rankings: March

2011-04-02T13:46:00.001+01:00

Another month of all change - at least outside the top five. This table is virtually unrecognisable from what it was a few months ago!

1	Pete Brown's Blog
2	Pencil & Spoon
3	Beer Reviews
4	Master Brewer at Adnams
5	Are You Tasting the Pith?
6	Bibendum Wine
7	Drinking Outside The Box
8	Travels With Beer
9	Zythophile
10	The Wine Conversation
11	The Good Stuff
12	Ghost Drinker
13	Raising the Bar
14	Spittoon
15	Called to the bar
16	Woolpack Dave's beer and stuff blog
17	HopZine.com
18	Tandleman's Beer Blog
19	Bordeaux-Undiscovered
20	The Pub Curmudgeon

Drinking made by Wikio

My return to the top is due to a combination of Young Dredge being preoccupied with starting a new job, and me finishing a freelance adman contract that freed up some time to blog. I think it will be the last time I'm top of the pile for a while... as the readership of beer blogs grows, it gets more competitive, and I'm not going to be able to blog as much for the rest of this year thanks to getting quite a bit of new column and feature work, the upcoming Stokey LitFest, the next Cask Report, and what will hopefully be imminent good news on new books which will need to be turned around very quickly - I'll blog more fully about those when and if they are confirmed.

You can see the list for yourself. From now on when I preview these rankings (and if you want to preview them yourself, PLEASE drop me a line - it would be good to spread this around a bit more) I think I'll just pick on one blog that's showing some action and urge you to check it out if you haven't already done so.

This month I want to have a look at number eight, Travels with Beer, mainly because it is more focused on pub photography than writing, and we don't really think about about photography generally when we think about communicating beer. Good photographs of pubs are wonderfully evocative, and Robert Gale from South Wales is very good at taking them. I get a very sharp yearning to just be in most of the pubs depicted on the site.

Rob is one half of www.BeerLens.com, a transatlantic partnership of beer loving snappers with the delightful Kim Reid in Rochester, NY. Kim was one of the people who looked after me on a recent trip to the city, and is probably the only person living in America who wishes she lived in Newport, South Wales, instead. Most people who live in Newport don't want to, so it's an extraordinary enthusiasm to have.

Travels with Beer is also brilliantly laid out and put together, and makes me feel quite ashamed of my basic blogger template.

Generally it feels like beer blogging is starting to get a bit more serious, a bit more respected, a bit more polished. There will always be good and bad of course, but 'noisome bloggers' (copyright: Roger Protz) have in the space of a few years become a fundamental part of beer communication, and have made it much more diverse, richer and more influential.

Social media + world's most sociable drink - not hard to see why, is it?

AB-Inbev hearts Goose Island. So now what do we do?

2011-03-30T09:11:00.003+01:00

I know I'm probably the last beer blogger on earth to weigh in with a comment on the news that AB-Inbev has bought Goose Island, but comment I must - even if I repeat what everyone else has said.

At the outset it looks tricky: I've criticised AB-Inbev more than any other macro, not out of any prejudice, but simply in response to their actions. And Goose Island is one of my favourite brewers in the world, with their IPA my standard issue secret weapon for converting people who 'don't like' beer.

AB-Inbev do not like beer. Most people I have met personally who work for the corporation don't even drink it. I have argued with AB-Inbev marketers, trying to convince them that, if you want to make money from selling beer, you must recognise that it is not like other grocery products - that it has more romance, charm and mystery around it, that people take a greater degree of ownership in beer brands than they do in other product sectors. And those marketers have disagreed with me, stating categorically that they feel beer is no different from any other product and can be standardised and treated exactly the same. Stuart Macfarlane, CEO of AB-Inbev UK, has said that he works not for a brewer, but for an FMCG marketing company that happens to sell beer. It's a company that has an industry-wide reputation for being a ruthless cost cutter - after all, their relentless expansion has to be paid for somehow. The tragedy of Stella Artois is that it was once a special beer, and the last ten years have seen every single ounce of value stripped from that beer. AB-Inbev is also a company where, if you are an employee and you are seen drinking a beer from a different brewer - even on your own time, off the clock, when the company is not paying you - this can be, in the words of more than one former employee, "a career ending move." (Apart from anything else that completely transgresses employer-employee relationships, making working for AB-Inbev a form of indentured slavery, and I look forward to the day when some ex-employee sues their asses over this disgraceful policy. And if what I am saying is not true, I invite AB-Inbev to sue me for libel. I'm not short on potential defence witnesses.)

So no - I don't think it's good news that a mean, ruthless, cost focussed, heartless, acquisitive, jealous company run by people who don't even like beer has bought one of the best craft brewers in the world.

But this is not because "they're a macro" - it's because of the specific organisational policies and practices I've outlined. Interbrew in the old days were not like this. Not all AB-Inbev's competitors are like this. My point is, it's not about how big they are, it's about what they do - it's about their record.

I can only hope that people on Twitter who talked about their Goose Island beer 'turning from a micro to a macro' when they were half way down a pint were joking. As many people have pointed out, AB have long had a stake in Goose Island - they've just upped the size of that stake into a controlling interest. If your problem with this is the mere association, the smell of a macro brewer, then - actually, you know what? You just stick with that. I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. But I don't think you'll end up a happier drinker because of it. The Goose Island products that are currently sitting in your beer fridge, in your local craft beer pub, your supermarket or beer shop, are no different than they were a week ago.

This takeover occurred, weirdly, just two days after I finished a piece for Brewers Guardian on innovation and new product development. In that piece, I argued that the brand management culture of big companies is entirely different from the entrepreneurial spirit of smaller companies. One can manage and grow brands on a global scale, but is incapable of nurturing genuinely new ideas to market. The other is the opposite. If a big company really wants something fresh and new, the best way for them to get it is to buy it, once it's reached a point where it has proven to be a profitable and sustainable niche product that is ready to make the transition to something bigger. And if a small company wants to grow beyond that point, the best thing they can do is to sell to a company that has processes, channels and people in place who know how to do that.

I think it's a perfectly valid argument for a craft beer fan to say, "Yeah, but we don't want them to grow! We want them to stay small and crafty." It's your opinion - beers are built by fans and fans have a say, and God knows, I'm all for supporting small companies because they are not multinationals. But remember, when a big company buys a small company in this way, the small company also wants to sell. If the people who built this thing from scratch, who devoted 20 years of their lives to it, decide this is the next step in the evolution of the business, you have to respect that.

So where does all that theory leave this particular acquisition? I'm in total agreement with Nigel Stevenson of James Clay, the importers of Goose Island into the UK. He says,

"Anheuser-Busch has acquired an American brewer of high acclaim, we thereby feel they recognise the potential within this market and appreciate that genuine craft beer brands cannot be 'invented' by a large Multinational organisation.

"At James Clay we are immensely proud to have been involved in Goose Island's growth and development over the years. We urge Anheuser-Busch to respect the culture of experimentation and innovation that has made Goose Island the world renowned brewer it is today. James Clay will continue to work with Goose Island in the UK but will monitor the impact of Anheuser-Busch closely.”

To illustrate what this could mean: I'm currently consulting with another global macro brewer who is doing a deal not dissimilar to this (though on nothing like the same scale). It's not something I will cover as a writer because that would be a conflict of interest, and I can't say who it is until it goes public later in the year. But the macro in question is saying to itself internally, "We can't manage brands like this the way we normally do - if we apply our standard processes to the craft market, we'll only fuck it up." The deal therefore gives the craft beer access to far greater distribution channels and new investment in the brewery, and gives the macro a slice of the profit plus a little kudos, and the chance to see how craft beer works. But the macro has committed to not trying to interfere with how the micro makes its beer.

Similar deals occurred in Canada a few years ago, when Molson Coors acquired craft brewers Creemore Springs and Granville Island. These beers now have far greater distribution, but so far their craft brewing values and ways of doing things have not been compromised by pressure from the macro.

Will AB-Inbev follow a similarly enlightened process? Who knows? It would be nice if they told us - the only comment so far, unless I've missed something, is from the Goose Island guys. On the one hand, their record makes me very pessimistic. On the other, despite recent evidence to the contrary, they can't actually be total morons. If they wanted to make Craft Beer Lite, they could do so without forking out $39m for Goose Island. One can only hope they've bought it for the right reasons - that they recognise the value of craft beer, concede that they cannot do it themselves, and have a deal in place that will allow the craft brewer to continue doing that they do best, but on a larger scale.

I wouldn't bet money on this, but I have my fingers crossed. Either way, I'll be waiting until they completely screw it up before I start attacking them for having done so.

Brew Dog hires rank amateurs to create its latest beer

2011-03-29T09:53:00.000+01:00

Entering the revolutionary spirit

Well, it was an offer we couldn't refuse. Especially when, with their trade mark hyperbole, Brew Dog publicly referred to us as 'the rock stars of the beer blogging world'*.

On 27th January, massively and pathetically hungover after hosting a beer dinner at Musa Aberdeen, Mark Dredge, Zak Avery and me were whisked up to Fraserburgh to brew a beer we had designed. (When I say 'we', I mean mainly Zak and Mark thought about it and designed it and I said 'yes'.)

We went into the hops store and chose the hops. We tipped the frankly worrying amount of malt into the mash tun, which we filled almost to the top, and we made Young Dredge stand on top of a ladder and do a continuous addition of hops throughout the boil. I've no idea how long this took him, because I bailed out early and was on my way home by then (to be fair, my flight was booked weeks before and brewing somehow took a lot longer - or started a lot later - than we had thought.)

The result is a 7.5% 'Imperious Pilsner'. Zak wrote some label copy that goes on about killing your ideals and worshipping your heroes and stuff, which is really good and adorns the bottle label. But basically it's doing to lager what new wave brewers such as Brew Dog have done to pale ales, porters and stouts. (I'm not saying we're the first - just that that's what we did.) It features an insane amount of Saaz hops, and was lagered for a full six weeks before being dry-hopped with yet more Saaz.

If we were music writers being offered the chance to go and make a record with a popular and influential band, the result would be horrible beyond belief. One of the nice things about the brewing world is that an idea like this can actually work out quite well.

The result of our collaboration is a bitter, hoppy character that's refreshingly different from the prevailing, ubiquitous Citra-sy trend. It's more elegant, more structured, more noble - a classy beer, a very firm, gentlemanly shake of the hand rather than a slap around the face.

We're giving Avery Brown Dredge a triple-headed launch this Thursday, 31st March, at three separate locations. Zak will be at the North Bar in Leeds, I'll be at the Jolly Butchers, London N16, and Mark will be at the Rake, London SE1, at 7.30pm. We'll probably link up with something like a #ABD hash tag on Twitter and try to do some Live Aid style three headed technology shenanigans.

Brew Dog MD James Watt will be joining me at JBs, and various other Brew Dog honchos will be at the other locations. These will be the only three outlets in the UK with the beer on draught, with just one keg each, so get there fast. I wouldn't be surprised if there were other Brew Dog treats turning up as well...

Post launch, the beer will be available only from the Brew Dog online shop. We hope you enjoy it!

*Being called rock stars, we had to decide which ones we were. Well, I did. Mark is obviously one of McFly. Zak is Flea out of Red Hot Chilli Peppers (I did not see his sock). And I' hoping to be Hooky out of New Order, but am probably Gary Barlow.

Beer duty: the facts, presented handily

2011-03-24T11:31:00.002Z

Not going to go on about this again but I just received a very useful press release from the BBPA. The trade body is calling for a 'return to clarity' over beer taxation, noting as I did yesterday that with an 'escalator' in place, announcing 'no new taxes' is wilfully misleading.

There were a few questions and comments after my post yesterday about how all the various figures and calculations around the swingeing duty increase add up, so I thought it would be useful to share the following table for the release.

BEER TAX INCREASE	7.2%
Predicted increase in tax of a typical pub pint	3.57p
Average new price of a pub pint of lager (4.2 per cent abv)	£3.05
New typical duty on a pub pint of lager	44p
New typical VAT on a pub pint of lager	51p
Combined VAT and duty increase this year	10p
Beer Tax increase since March 2008	35.4%
British Beer Tax, times higher than France	7.9
British Beer Tax, times higher than Germany	12.4
British Beer Tax, times higher than Spain	12.0

The release also contains one crucially important piece of information, which I urge you to share with everyone you know, especially your MP: with the 7.2% rise yesterday compounded by the 2.5% rise in VAT in January, 2011 has already seen the highest EVER increase in tax and duty on beer in any single year.

Chancellor punches beer and pubs in the face with one hand - but gives us a clever gift with the other

2011-03-23T16:31:00.002Z

I have no plans to kick this oleaginous, deceitful, dishonest, callous multi-millionaire (inherited) repeatedly in the face*

Today's budget has been called many things. 'A budget for growth'. A 'tax cutting budget'. It comes one week after David Cameron promised to 'remove all obstacles to growth' from small businesses. You know, businesses like, ooh, craft breweries. Or pubs.

So it's pretty repulsive that in what is indeed being hailed by the media as a budget for growth, George Gideon Osborne hit beer with a whopping 7.2% tax increase, bringing the total increase in VAT and duty on beer to a whopping 32.4% since October 2008.

"Whoa, hang on there, Pete!" I hear you saying. "I've been watching the budget, and Osborne specifically said that beer tax wasn't going up."

Did he?

Oh yes, he must have done. Look, the Guardian says "No change to rates of alcohol duty." The BBC confirms this in its coverage, categorically stating that the chancellor "froze alcohol duties."

That must mean alcohol duty didn't go up, right? There is no other possible meaning of the words being reported right there.

Wrong.

What Osborne actually said was there would be "no additional rise" in alcohol duty.

No additional rise. But that means it's not going up, surely! Well, that's what it means to any casual observer. The man in the street. In fact, anyone who does not have a thorough working knowledge of treasury tax plans in relation to the brewing industry.

If you DO know those plans (and if you don't work in beer or pubs, there's no reason you should), you will know that Labour instigated a 'beer duty escalator' of inflation plus 2% every year, and that one of the first things Osborne did on coming to power was to extend this so that it happens every year until 2014. So when Osborne says there are no additional rises, he means no rises in addition to the 7.2% he was already planning to slap on.

See what he did there?

By saying he was only going to increase tax by the amount he planned to increase tax by, that is, by saying he isn't going to implement any tax rises on top of the tax rises he was already planning to implement, he's conned everyone - including intelligent, major, reputable news outlets - into thinking he hasn't increased taxes at all.

If you didn't know about the duty escalator, you would have no idea what he'd just done.

True, he's only applying the tax increases Labour would have done. But at least Labour told us honestly and clearly that they were shafting us, and how much by.

So it's a tragedy for everyone really. Pubs will close because of this. Jobs will be lost because of it. The price of a pint will go up 10p because of it. And the most stupid part is, the effect it will have on demand means that the treasury will actually make less money because of it. Stupid beyond belief.

But while we lick our wounds over this latest battering, we should reflect on the marvellous gift Osborne has given us with this new piece of spin, a greasy deceit that even Malcolm Tucker would applaud.

Because we can all take this same linguistic construct, this same extreme economy with the truth, and use it in our every days lives.

Say, for example, that I haven't had anything to drink for five days, and tonight I plan to go out and drink ten pints and get rat-arsed. If you ask me, "Are you going to have another night off the beer tonight?" I can simply reply, "My plans relating to drink tonight remain unchanged. I won't be drinking any additional beer." Unless you know I was already planning to drink ten pints (and you won't, because I haven't told you) you'll think I'm not going to drink. Hah! But the joke is on you, because I am!

Here's another one. I'm very angry with George Osborne, even angrier now than when I first saw his pompous, arrogant little face sneering down at the rest of us while he rubbed his multi-million pound inheritance all over his pasty white doughy skin. I have always thought that if I ever met him, I would kick him repeatedly in the face.

But you don't know that.

So, say I was invited to a Parliamentary Beer Group function at which he was going to be a guest, and someone took me to one side and said, "Pete, we know you're very angry with Mr Osborne about his wilful deception and deliberate misleading of the media and the British people over beer duty increases. You're not hoping to kick him repeatedly in the face or anything are you?"

I could in all honesty reply, "The way that upper class, over-privileged, callous, pig-ignorant dickhead misled the nation over alcohol duty has not increased the likelihood of me kicking him repeatedly in the face. Not one bit. I have no additional plans to kick him in the face repeatedly." And unless you were listening very, very carefully, you'd think I meant I wasn't planning on kicking him repeatedly in the face.

It's brilliant!

I'm going to use it all the time from now on.

*Or rather, what I mean is, the plans I have to do so have not changed.

Champagne beers: they're lovely!

2011-03-22T13:13:00.000Z

It strikes me that, for a beer blog, I don't actually write much specifically about beer itself on here. Partly that's a conscious decision - there are roughly a gazillion blogs providing reviews and analysis of favourite beers and I'm not sure we need another one.

But hey, it's a beer blog. The reason we're here is that we enjoy drinking beer. And every so often, beers come up that are too remarkable not to comment on.

I've always loved 'champagne beers'. Up to now there have been too few of them to attempt anything so anal as defining the 'style', and I'd resist that even now, because I think the inspiration of champagne, the selective application of some champagne ingredients and/or processes, signals a creative approach that combines classiness and elegance with a wonderfully liberating playfulness, and I would resist at all costs attempts to stifle that with anything so boring as a style guide.

But there are certainly enough of them around now - all different - to suggest, if not a style, than a loose coalition, a movement, a trend.

The first one on most people's radar was Deus, still magnificent, a Belgian Tripel matured with champagne yeast in champagne caves, using the traditional methods of remuage and degorgement, where during secondary fermentation, the bottles are turned and angled so the yeast collects in the neck, where it can be frozen and extracted.

Simpler - in both process and flavour - is Kasteel Cru. This is simply a lager fermented with champagne yeast, and while as such it's easy to dismiss, it has some merit - it's light, spritzy and has a grapey hint, a great aperitif that prompts re-evaluation among people who 'don't like beer'.

There are other Belgians who have followed Deus' lead, most notably (for me) Malheur Brut, which is possibly even better than Deus.

But I've recently been given three new champagne(style) beers in quick succession, and they each make me very happy indeed. In no particular order...

Infinium, by Samuel Adams and Weihenstephan

Roll up! Roll up!

Samuel Adams is a brewery that understands the value of special, premium packaging, but can sometimes err into gaudy rather than premium. This one stays on the right side of the line, but only just - with the result that it looks magnificent - like it was created by some insane genius who lives within a travelling funfair invented by Terry Gilliam. Whether your initial reaction to the following image is a laugh or gasp probably reveals something deep about your psyche:

Brewers by appointment to Dr Parnassus

But what about the beer?

The press release is full of superlatives. German Weihenstephan is 'the world's oldest brewery', and this collaboration has 'shattered industry preconceptions of the limits of the German purity laws', by remaining faithfully within those laws to produce a beer that's 10.5% ABV that will be in 'selected outlets for discerning consumers prepared to pay vintage champagne-style prices.'

I was lucky enough to be sent a bottle. It made me want to wait for a special occasion to open it, but I couldn't - I gave in, celebrating the fact that I was at home for once on a Sunday (the Beer Widow would argue that this is an event rare enough to celebrate with vintage Krug.)

It pours an amazing, alluring bronze colour, beautiful and rich.

It has complex nose of caramel, that biscuity vintage champagne aroma, with a hint of sherry sweetness. It's one of those rare, special beers where you enjoy nosing it so much, you almost forget to drink it.

You should though.

On the palate there's banana, lemon, caramel, perfectly judged winter spices and a brief, intense sweetness before a nice champagne-like dryness and a hint of earthiness at the back.

It's classy, elegant and sophisticated, yet fuller and bolder than other champagne beers I've had. It's available in a mere two outlets in the UK: Vino Wines in Edinburgh, and Inspire, a cafe bar in Coventry. Utterly random, but there you go. More info is available from Branded Drinks.

Bowland Artisan Gold
If the location for an artisanal champagne beer surprises you, the quality of that beer will surprise you further still. Bowland is a microbrewery some miles north of Burnley, Lancashire, which has been doing a good job of crafting quality ales since 2003 (its Admiral Best Bitter was named Champion Best Bitter of Britain in the recent SIBA awards, and I reviewed it on the Vlog from those awards).

Bowland brewer Richard Baker decided the only way he could absolutely guarantee perfect beer time after time would be to produce a top quality bottled beer. He wanted to use bottle conditioning, but didn't want to leave a sediment - and that made him think of champagne-style secondary fermentation. Baker studied champagne methods in depth and reproduced them as closely as he was able, and this is the result:

You want premium? You got premium

It's a remarkable beer. It has all the refinement and complexity of any other champagne beer - though perhaps not the dense layers of flavour - at a low (for champagne beer) ABV of 5.7%. I'm afraid I didn't make too many tasting notes on this one, just lots of adjectives like 'classy' and 'elegant'. The mix of noble and new world hops gives it a lot of fruit, but it's held in check by a smooth dryness. I felt I was wasting it, enjoying it in front of the TV with a bowl of pasta, and I was very sad indeed when I finished the bottle, because it's very quaffable despite (or probably because of) its structure and complexity.

Richard Baker told me, "I am hoping that Artisan Gold will help to open up the minds of people in Britain to the fact that beer is not just for swilling down in back street pubs up North (although there’s nowt wrong with that!) but that there are craft brewers all over the country producing a wide range of beers that we should be massively proud of and that there really is a beer for everyone if they just opened themselves up and gave it a try."

It should certainly work. Served in a glass like the one above, it's one of those beguiling drinks you can't pin down into a category. You may not even be certain it's a beer at all.

Artisan Gold is available only from Northcote Manor - the Michelin-starred restaurant a few miles from the brewery - the brewery itself, and the online shop, where you can buy it mail order for £15.99.

The price tag made me hesitate, and that made me think - I'd pay that happily for Deus, at 11.5% ABV, but was hesitant here because the beer is only 5.7%. Fascinating, because I don't know about you, but I like to think I'm above paying for alcohol units, that for me, it's all about the quality of the beer. I always bang on about how quality is not necessarily linked to ABV. With Artisan Gold, you're paying for the time, the care and attention, the method, and the experience of a beer that is easily worth the price tag. It may require you to overcome a prejudice you may not even have been sure you had, but it's worth the effort.

Chapel Down Curious Brew Brut

This isn't quite the same deal as the previous two. But I include it here to show the breadth of champagne(style) beers.

By the standards of Infinium and Artisan Gold it's more of an everyday drink. But by the standards of draught lager - which is how we should be judging it - it's just as special as the previous two.

Chapel Down is one of the leading English wineries, based in Kent. Their wines are seriously good, and if your experience of English wine stretches as far as fruit wines that are half a step away from home brew, you need to shift your frame of reference south, to the Loire valley and the champagne region - Kent has a similar climate and terroir, and Chapel Down wines easily stand alongside their French cousins.

The thing is, the MD of Chapel Wines is a former beer man, having worked for Whitbread and Heineken (full disclaimer: he's an ex-client and current friend of mine) and he's been dabbling for a few years with getting winemakers to approach beer with a wine sensibility. Bottled Curious Brew Brut, Admiral Porter and Cobb IPA are all well worth seeking out, each with a winey twist. Now, Brut has been revamped and launched around Kent on draught.

It's a premium strength lager, lagered for a decent length of time, and brewed with sparkling wine yeast. As such it's along similar lines to Kasteel Cru, but the end result is quite different. It's a fuller, more assertive beer, more fruity and rounded, that grapey sweetness getting a much bigger stage to show off on, but still reined in at the end by a crisp dryness. Refreshing and satisfying, the true test of it is that it feels vulgar drinking it from a pint, as I first did. Get it in the correct half pint glass, and it's a lovely halfway house between beer and sparkling wine in every way, and proved to be the perfect aperitif before dinner at the winery's excellent restaurant last weekend.

It's currently brewed by Hepworth's, who do a lot of contract brewing, but Chapel Down is considering commissioning its own brewery alongside the winery just outside Tenterden. If the current sales growth continues, that should be happening pretty soon.

So, that's some seriously fancy drinking right there. And I've just remembered why I don't write as many beer reviews as I should. It's 12.19, and I'm now gasping for a beer...

Video Blog: The SIBA Conference

2011-03-20T11:58:00.000Z

SIBA is the Society of Independent Brewers, kind of the equivalent to the Brewers' Association in the US, and it's doing a grand job of fuelling the growth of great quality beer from small producers in the UK. It is a beer trade body, and as such it has its political struggles, battles with other bodies, internal strife and all the rest of the issues that plague every trade body in beer. But SIBA events are fun. And the people who organise and run them are decent, talented people who you enjoy having a pint with. I wrote here about the time I had at the conference last year, so it was a pleasure to go back with the film crew this year.

So what happens in this episode? It's twelve minutes long, so let me guide you through it.

First, Peter Amor talks to SIBA head Julian Grocock about the society, what its stands for and what it does to help promote beer. SIBA organises a year-long brewing competition, where beers judged at regional heats go through to a national final, with the winners announced at the conference. I then sneak into the bar while the conference is going on in the next room, and help myself to a sneak preview and tasting of all the category winners (or rather, all bar one in the final edit - not everyone likes the fact that SIBA judged a national keg beer competition this year). This gets interspersed with interviews with some of the young, new cask ale brewers who were at the conference this year, where we seek to uncover the motivations behind a new generation entering the brewing industry. This concludes with an interview with the brewer who created this year's grand champion. Which of the beers was it? Well, if you're eagle-eyed during the tasting segment, you'll spot it well before I did...

These video blogs now have their own home on the web too. Go to http://www.britishbeervideoblog.blogspot.com/ if you want to see them all together, and there'll also be the odd extra bonus clip knocking around there too. You can also find the embed code there now that allows you to feature them on your own site of you wish.

Finally, can I ask for some feedback? This year of video blogs represents a significant financial investment, which aims to help spread beer appreciation beyond the usual community of beer aficionados and hopes to reach a wider audience. If you've been following them for the last six months you'll see that we've tried different formats and ideas, and also that we're steadily learning our craft as presenters (the filmmakers already knew what they were doing). We want to make them as good as we can. Any constructive comments would be very gratefully received!

Stunning hypocrisy proves alcohol regulators simply don't get the point.

2011-03-18T12:14:00.002Z

The venue used by a government minister to launch British Tourism Week is BANNED from selling beers above 5% ABV - but faces no restrictions on the wine and spirits it can sell.

"Can I have a Worthington White Shield?"
"No! Fancy a Tequila slammer instead?"

I spotted this story yesterday in The Publican. At first it was mildly irritating, and then, while I was being pissed off with the total and utter ineptitude of both O2 and my email so-called provider, Fasthosts, I realised I was very angry with this too.

The newly rebuilt Grand Pier at Weston-Super-Mare was used by tourism minister John Penrose, along with Weston's local MP, to launch British Tourism Week this week. Presumably, this location was deemed significant because it represents what's great about British tourism and British culture.

However, the Publican learned that when the pier, previously destroyed by fire, reopened last October, police intervened in the licensing application process and demanded that the owners enforce a ban on beers over 5% so the location would not become “known as somewhere that sold strong beer”. No such stipulation was made regarding wines and spirits.

So a quality, classic British ale like Worthington White Shield (5.6%) is banned, but shots and shooters are not.

OK, so are they doing this because they hate beer? Of course not. They're doing it because Weston is home to 11% of the UK's entire stock of drug and alcohol rehabilitation places, and piers in seedy seaside towns are classic venues for hardcore drunks to gather over a few purple tins.

But it's yet another case of stupid action following reasonable intent. The pier staff say it doesn't bother them - presumably they don't see a market for Belgian ales, American IPAs or even nice homegrown winter warmers and strong ales in the average promenader.

But what if that were to change? Duvel, for example (8.5%), is growing by 40% year on year and appearing in fashionable bars not normally noted for beer geekery. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (5.6%) and Brooklyn Lager (5.2%) are similarly breaking out into mainstream pubs, bars and restaurants, but are banned from Weston pier for the foreseeable future.

This is a classic example of our obsession with ABV in beer masking the real nature of the problem. It's insulting to brewers and drinkers to show no distinction between them and the tramp drinking Tennent's Super.

But worse than that, as is always the case with rulings like this, I doubt it does much to help the people it's meant to.

The eternal frustration in the debate about alcohol is how little attention those regulating it actually pay to the data. I've said many, many times that alcohol consumption, binge drinking, alcohol related disorder etc are all in long term decline. The one anomaly is that liver-related hospital complaints are still up (or they were until last year, when that figure fell too). What this demonstrates is that while the total population is drinking less, a particular segment is drinking to increasingly harmful levels.

So what are they drinking? Well, beer volumes over the last twenty years have gone off a cliff. But within that total decline in alcohol consumption, wine and spirits consumption is actually up. Every significant drinking epidemic in history is strongly linked with a sharp rise in spirits consumption, and that's what's happening here - the vast majority of people who drink solely to get drunk do so on spirits. If you don't believe me, just ask them - I did.

And that's the real tragedy - the recovering alcoholics of Weston-Super-Mare are still able to go on to the pier and drink as much vodka as they wish. Meanwhile, beer is yet again made a completely unjustified scapegoat for alcohol abuse.

Ignorance. Complete and utter ignorance.

The strange relationship between the Local and the Regular

2011-03-18T07:33:00.000Z

So it's looking like the Publican mag is on its way out - shame, I've really enjoyed writing for them.

Here is the piece I've done recently that I'm most proud of. They haven't put it on the web edition so I thought I'd share it here.

It’s one of the most complex and enduring relationships in modern life.

Statistics recently showed that we’re more likely to get divorced and remarried than change your bank. Well, if that’s the scale of comparison, we’re probably more likely to change our bank and love the new one so much that we divorce our partners and marry our bank managers than we are to voluntarily change our choice of local pub.

The ‘Local’ and the ‘Regular’ – each a British icon on their own right – together tell you approximately 84.3 per cent of everything you need to know about the rituals, rigmarole and rhythms of the Great British Pub.

“The usual, John?”

“Jeff been in yet?”

“You can’t sit there, mate. That’s Bill’s chair.”

I remember the important rite of passage to maturity of becoming a regular in my first local, as clear as if it were yesterday. I’d been at St.Andrews University for about six weeks. My new mates favoured one particular pub, the Niblick, because that’s where the second years said they went, and we wanted to fit in and appear urbane. It was run by Tony, a man as physically tiny as his presence was huge, one of those special bar managers who imprints his authority on a pub with effortless ease. A man whose approval you craved and anger you feared, whether you were an eighteen year-old student or a windcreased, hard-as-nails Old Course caddy. This one November night, I walked through the door and looked towards the bar’s golden glow. It was busy, one or two deep, with two people serving. One of them was Tony. He peered over the punters’ heads (not easy if you’re five foot three, but that’s what I mean – once behind that bar, he could do anything), nodded and smiled at me, “Alright Pete!” and had my beautiful pint of Tennent’s Lager – yeah, alright, Tennent’s Lager, I was eighteen – waiting for me on the bar by the time I made it through the crowd.

Tony knew my name!

We were spoilt for choice for pubs in St Andrews. But nine in every ten pints I drank during my university career from that day on were sunk in the Niblick.

The Regular is the person who has his own tankard on a hook behind the bar, and woe betide the newbie who serves him a beer in a different glass. He’s the guy who sends a postcard to the pub on the rare occasions he goes somewhere else on holiday. Who takes quiet pride when a photo of him from New Years Eve gets blu-tacked up beside the optics. The guy who a Leicester Local has to keep an Everard’s Beacon pump on the bar for, because even though he and his mate (they’ve never been to each other’s houses – only the pub) are the only punters who drink it, it’s the only beer they will drink, and they get through a nine between them every week.

This is a relationship with as much loyalty, love, bickering and fractious argument, frustration and fatalism as any great marriage. Each needs the other to survive.

All of which brings me to my shameful confession: I’m currently a bigamist.

When I first moved to Stoke Newington, my closest pub, the White Hart, spoke to me in a way no other pub had since the Niblick all those years ago. I could tell you about the food, the beer garden, the Sunday afternoon footie… It was all of that and none of that. It just felt like my local.

And then, last year, the Jolly Butchers opened just up the road. Eight handpulls standing proud along the centre of the bar. Staff keen to hear from me what beers they should be getting in. Cracking food, a beer and cheese pairing menu I helped put together.

Now, every time I’m in one, I miss the other. And the smiles of the respective guvnors are growing brittle. Whenever I walk in either, it’s “Oh, we haven’t seen you for a while. Been there, with them I suppose, have you?” Recently I’ve been so busy with work I’ve hardly been in either, and now each thinks I’ve abandoned them for the other.

Guys, if you’re reading this, I love you both, very much indeed. It’s just… complicated.

Happy Paddy's Day!

2011-03-17T09:01:00.003Z

While I was writing Three Sheets I found this great book called Planet Party. Basically it's an analysis of ten of the world's greatest festivals, from Munich's Oktoberfest to the Mexican day of the Dead.

The central thesis of the book is that civilizations need rules, conformity and order to survive. But as we live most of our lives like this, we also need occasionally to let off steam, to throw over the rules and routine and go a bit batshit, safe in the knowledge that everyone is doing so, that this is a temporary suspension of order, permissible anarchy. Author Iain Gately then travels the world demonstrating this principle in every continent and culture on the planet.

The only problem with the book is that for such a joyous subject, he writes it in a very dry, semi-academic fashion. Perhaps that's partly why it's now out of print. Since reading it I've wanted to do a similar book, going to the most extreme drinking festivals on the planet, following the same principle but getting stuck in as I do so rather than observing from outside. The publishers won't buy it though: it feels too much like a direct sequel to Three Sheets, and that's the poorest selling of my three books (it sold well - just not as well as the other two) and it feels like it would serve the law of diminishing returns.

I haven't let that stop me enjoying myself along the paths Gately has illuminated though: I go to as many of these festivals as I can. The Jack in the Green Festival in Hastings on May Bank Holiday is a marvellous release of pagan lust and joy until about 4pm, when everyone goes back home and puts the kettle on. And I'll soon be writing about various Wassails I went to in January - hundreds of people standing in a muddy farmyard at night in the middle of January, worshipping trees and getting riotously pissed, smack in the middle of the grimmest time of the year - it makes me tear up just thinking about what a wonderful expression of the human spirit this is.

Which brings us to St Patrick's Day, celebrated around the world today.

Here's are ten things that I really, really don't want to talk about today, because it utterly misses the point (even though I might have done in the past - today is not the day):

How St Patrick wasn't really Irish
Why we celebrate St Patrick more than our own patron saints
How tedious it is that everyone seeks an Irish connection
How the Paddy's Day Angry Birds update is possibly racist

Did someone say "Thieving Irish pigs"?

Plastic paddies and bad Irish theme pubs
The fact that stout (or rather, the porter that led to it) actually originates from London
Opinions as to whether Guinness is any good or not in a world where we now have lots of quality stouts and porters
Whether or not Guinness tastes better in Ireland
Whatever Guinness is doing marketing/PR-wise on its biggest day of the year
Why people who drink Guinness today don't drink it the rest of the year

What I shall be doing instead is marvelling at the way people across our entire planet use a flimsy excuse to give themselves permission to celebrate, not celebrating anything in particular, not really, but rather adopting an oversimplified version of one of the world's greatest drinking cultures and pretending to be part of it for one night, knowing that everyone else in pubs and bars the world over is doing the same. And I'll be marvelling that beer is at the heart of this, that beer's sociability, its miraculous ability to bring joy to its groups of drinkers, is at the core of the ritual.

What will I be drinking myself? Well, I'll probably go to the Auld Shillelagh on Stoke Newington Church Street and fight my way to the bar in what is normally a quiet Irish pub, and have a couple of the best pints of Guinness in North London. I might come home early and open the bottle of Otley porter I was sent for St David's Day, or the stunning Imperial Stout that debuted the Meantime College Beer Club, or the Quantock Brewery Stout that won bronze in SIBA's national bottled beer competition and turned up on my doorstep yesterday. It doesn't matter. I'll be drinking dark beer because that's what you do on St Patrick's Day. It's what everyone does.

And that is, in my view, what's really worth celebrating.

Celebrating the Beer Hunter

2011-03-16T08:27:00.000Z

This month the Brewery History Society releases a very special edition of its magazine, focused on the life and work of Michael Jackson, the Beer Hunter.

When I won UK Beer Writer of the Year in 2009, it was a particular honour because it was the first year when the award was named after Jackson. And it was even more of an honour some months later when, as the winner of that award, I was invited to guest-edit this collection of pieces about Michael and his immense contribution to beer appreciation and beer writing.

There are more details of the result here, and you can download my introduction here. But in a nutshell: the BHS' Tim Holt came up with the idea, and suggested we approach various writers with topics they might want to cover. With one exception, everyone we approached immediately came back and said yes, and delivered their pieces promptly.

I took a while to get around to reading the collection we'd assembled. But when I finally did, I read the whole lot in just about one sitting. When I was judging the beer writers' awards last year, there was so much to get through we had to skim-read the entries first time around to whittle them down. With such a big pile to get through, it was rare indeed to find a piece that you ended up reading the whole way through, and left you disappointed that you'd got to the end and there was no more. Every time that happened, you knew you had a winner from the 400+ entries in front of you.

I'm not just being obsequious here, but that happened with each one of the pieces of writing in this collection. What makes it even more compelling is the way it builds, so you turn to each new chapter going, 'What, he did that as well?' It truly is staggering to see Michael's entire contribution to beer writing and beer appreciation, even the welfare and development of beer and brewing itself, summarised so comprehensively and so well.

We're launching the collection at The Rake in Borough Market, SE1, on Sunday 27th March at 6pm - I only just found out that, appropriately enough, this is the anniversary of Michael's birthday. Tim Holt, continuing his excellent job at making this whole project happen, is trying to get as many of the writers as possible to attend. Mark Dredge and I will definitely be there. Others would have to travel from further afield, but include Zak Avery, Roger Protz, John Keeling, Jeff Evans, Carolyn Smagalski, John Richards and Martyn Cornell.

The magazine goes out free to BHS members and costs £4.50 otherwise. If you can't make it on the night, I guess you can get them from the Brewery History Society website.

Hope to see you there.

All at sea again: Imperial Russian Stout is coming home.

2011-03-11T16:17:00.000Z

I am SO going on this.

This is old news now, but I've been meaning to promote it for ages and, having just paid my deposit, now seems like the perfect time.

This June - almost four years since I recreated the journey of IPA from Burton-on-Trent to India - a group of brewers corralled by a man almost as mad as I am will be recreating the Baltic Run, from London to St Petersburg.

This is the journey that foreshadowed IPA, and its recreation is taking place on the kind of epic scale, and with the a level of authenticity, that I only wish I could have achieved with my adventure. Tim O' Rourke, a longstanding figure in the beer industry, had the idea a few years ago after a chat I had with him about my IPA voyage, and he's worked tirelessly to make it a reality.

He's hired Thermopylae - the yacht above - and convinced eleven brewers to create Imperial Russian Stouts that will be loaded on board after a special beer festival in London, running from 12th to 15th May. The ship will then set sail across the North Sea, and will tour pubs and beer festivals around the Baltic, with the intention of arriving in St Petersburg on 15th June. The journey will be in stages, and volunteer crew are still needed for various bits of it. It's a non-proft making venture and hiring a round-the-world clipper plus professional skipper and watch captains doesn't come cheap, so it costs £700 per person per week. But it's worth it to be part of this once-in-a-lifetime - sod that, once-in-two-centuries -experience.

It's a common misconception that stout was shipped to Russia by Burton brewers in the days of the Czars. Well, while some stout may or may not have gone in later days, the beer that made Burton famous was strong, sweet, nut-brown ale. Years later though, London's porter brewers got in on the act and started exporting their beers to Imperial courts that fell in love with strong British beer styles. British ships originally went to the Baltic to source wood for barrels, and figured they needed to take something on the outward journey to make it worthwhile. So they took beer, and it really took off. Maybe it was because of Staffordshire glass blowers working on the new palaces of St Petersburg. Maybe it was inspired by attempts to keep up with Peter the Great, who served it at royal banquets, or Catherine the Great, who was 'immoderately fond' of British beer. But the Baltic was Britain's first great export market, until a combination of Bonaparte and prohibitive duty rates killed the trade off. Back in Burton, it was the infrastructure and knowhow developed for the Baltic trade that allowed Burton brewers to crack the Indian market.

On the modern day version, the beers taking the trip come from:

1. Harveys

2. Coors Museum Brewery/William Worthington Brewery

3. Wadworth

4. Shepherd Neame

5. St Austell

6. Elgood's

7. Thrornbridge

8. Meantime

9. Bartram Brewery

10. Black Sheep

11. Fullers

I wish I could go along for the whole voyage, but I'll be helping The Beer Widow organise Stokey Lit Fest again at the start of June. Happily, we have just enough time to recover from the Litfest before getting a flight to Helsinki, where we'll meet the ship and her cargo for the final leg to St Petersburg and what will hopefully be a triumphant arrival.

Middle of June, Baltic, a sun that never sets... I might even take the Beer Widow with me this time. Go to www.thegreatbalticadventure.com if you're interested in joining us.

We've got to acc-en-tu-ate the positive

2011-03-07T08:26:00.002Z

Sorry - really long post - really big topic.

I’ve seen lots of conversations recently that all come together around a central theme that is, to my mind at least, one of the key themes for beer this year. Namely this: factionalism and blind prejudice – on various sides – is threatening to kill, or at least stall, the beer revolution.

The people's front of Judea and the popular Judean people's front. Or is it the other way round?

It first struck me when Martyn Cornell expressed his dismay that seven of the supposed ten best beers in the world are Imperial Stouts, which began a war of indignation that has currently run to almost 150 comments on his blog. Then, after my recent posting on a very good-natured and enjoyable beer versus wine matching dinner, Cooking Lager temporarily dropped his comedy mask to make the very good observation that in wine, you never hear people promoting good wine by slagging off cheap wine. And, last week, I was talking to Zak Avery about my growing concern over negativity in the beer scene, and he said, ‘wait till you see my next column’. Zak published his thoughts on the subject yesterday, arguing for more inclusivity and tolerance.

As Zak says, the passion that people have for beer can only be a good thing, and I would never want to deter anyone from expressing their passion. I’d just ask you to think about the way in which you express it (and by the way, I’m not exempting myself here – I’ve been guilty too).

When I first started writing about beer, I was infuriated by CAMRA because it was the only voice in the UK championing good beer, and it did so in a way that I felt was blinkered, bigoted, and downright insulting to beer drinkers who were not already part of the club. CAMRA-friendly beer writers would not only dismiss mainstream beers as ‘industrial yellow fizz’, but also their drinkers as brainwashed morons. It was only half a step away from the nasty abuse of ‘chavs’ or ‘pikeys’ under which class prejudice hides today – sometimes not even that far.

CAMRA has since changed and become more open, and has seen its membership double. I think the two are not unrelated. (From now on, I’m going to refer to the rump of unreconstructed CAMRA diehards who hate anything new or different as Old CAMRA, to differentiate them from the broader-minded but still real ale-loving mainstream CAMRA).

But CAMRA is no longer the only voice championing good beer. We now have what Zak refers to as the ‘crafterati’ – beer bloggers and other vocal drinkers who champion great beers from or influenced by the North American brewing scene. I’d like to believe I was among the first of these in the UK. But now I look at what Martyn calls ‘the extremophiles’, and I’m seeing a similar unpleasant snobbery to that of CAMRA ten years ago – just coming from a different direction. Where the rump of Old CAMRA members still dismiss even quality Czech and German lagers as ‘yellow fizz’, the extremophiles similarly deride ‘Boring Brown Beer’. Each dismisses vast swathes of beer, denigrating perfectly good brews simply because they are not of the style they prefer.

Old CAMRA and the extremophiles do at least agree on one thing – that any beer brewed by a big brewery must be shit. In the US, the definition of Craft Beer hinges on the size of the brewery rather than the ingredients and processes used, or the passion of the brewer. Over here, Old CAMRA now forgets that it was regional brewers like Young’s and Greene King who kept real ale alive long enough for the micros to arrive, casting them in the role of evil big brewers oppressing the micros, while extremophiles dismiss their beers as hopelessly square and bland.

All of this is childish, and ultimately damaging for beer – all beer.

I just got back from the SIBA conference, where one of the prevailing attitudes was inclusivity about what makes good beer. During the closing panel session, Roger Protz cut an increasingly isolated figure as he defended CAMRA’s stance on only promoting cask ale. One minute he said CAMRA could only ever promote real ale because that is what it is for, suggesting that this forty year-old body is simply incapable of changing to reflect changing times. The next minute he boasted that CAMRA had proudly defended Budvar for twenty years. The brewers of quality British lager – some brewed locally – who were in the room were left scratching their heads as to why CAMRA could promote a foreign quality lager but not a British one. Roger confessed to enjoying some quality keg products and exhorted fans of them to form a campaign for keg ale. But in doing so he missed the whole point – it’s not about cask or keg. It’s now about a broader championing of good beer in an age where method of dispense is no longer the key differentiator of quality. The audience - comprising mainly of cask ale brewers - was then asked if they thought CAMRA should broaden its remit. A show of hands revealed roughly 80% believed CAMRA should – and I repeat, these are brewers of cask ale. Roger said he was ‘horrified’ by this result.

At the other end of the scale, we had a Guild of Beer Writers meeting last week, and after the meeting, we all enjoyed pints of Gales Seafarers, Adnams Bitter and London Pride. These beers were perfectly kept, wonderfully tasty, but some of us who might be counted as ‘crafterati’ (me included) felt a need to justify or at least comment upon the fact that we could enjoy these ‘boring brown beers’ as much as we did. I’ve enjoyed great pints of Greene King IPA on occasion – in the right pub at the right time – and I now reject a beer scene where anyone needs to be defensive about that, just as much as I reject a beer scene that says cask ale is the only beer worth drinking.

There was a different aspect of the same thing with some of the criticism of the Proud of Beer video. Why was Carling in there? Wasn’t this supposed to be a video promoting craft beer? Well, no. It was supposed to be a video promoting the British beer industry. Because if Old CAMRA, the extremophiles, those arguing that SIBA brewers are parasites, those who believe Molson Coors are going to close down Sharps (even though the Cornish brewery has just had some brand new fermenting vessels delivered), those who hate beer tickers, those who say cask is dead, those who say keg is de facto shit, those who think any beer with under 50 IBUs is shit – if you could all just lift your heads out of you navels and look around for a bit, you’d see the real picture.

There’s a war on drink at the moment, and beer is the scapegoat. Every article on Britain’s binge drinking epidemic uses the pint as its frame of reference, despite the fact that beer sales overall are nose diving while wine and spirits sales increase. Tax on beer has gone up by 26% in the last two years, and will go up by another 7% in this month’s budget. Beer is massively under-represented in popular press coverage, and most people in the general public still perceive it as uninteresting and not for them. Pubs are closing at the rate of 29 a week.

So if you care about beer enough to write about it, or evangelise it in any other way, it would be really great if you could do so positively. Anyone who looks in on our industry, our beer scene, from the outside, sees a pack of squabbling kids. If you’re a curious drinker who might try beer, it puts you off pretty quickly. If you’re a minister wondering whether the industry deserves a break, you see a fragmented and ineffective lobbying body. By focusing on internal battles, we’re allowing wine and spirits on one side and teetotallers on the other to reposition beer as something not worth bothering with. We simply don’t make Planet Beer look like a very attractive place to be.

I’m not saying don’t be passionate about your favourite beer or favourite beer style. But I would ask you to try one experiment. If you do write about beer, and you write something about a beer you like, and you use what you regard as a crap beer as a point of comparison, save it and put it to one side. Then, try to write the same piece without slagging off inferior beers. Now, find a friend whose opinion you trust, who isn’t as passionate about beer as you, and ask them which they think reads better, which makes them want to try your beer – the one that praises the beer on its own merits, or the one that slags off what it is not?

Also – anticipating the first wave of comments and cries of hypocrisy here – I’m not saying never be critical, and I’m not saying don’t call bullshit when you see (or taste) it. But do judge something on its own merits.

Think of, say, a Jay Rayner restaurant review. He does negative reviews – and how – but he does these on the basis of the restaurants own merits or lack of them, visiting it, and taking it on its own terms. He doesn’t slag off a kebab shop for not having a Michelin star, or a provincial family-run restaurant for not being in the West End.

See what I’m saying? I hope so. When I slagged off Stella Black, for example, I did so on the basis of tasting it, judging it as the super-premium lager it claimed to be. It was revealing and sad that Cooking Lager expressed surprise that I had actually tasted it before slagging it off – what does that say about our perceived prejudices?

What I am saying is two things:

Firstly, let’s not draw these ideological lines in the sand any more. Let’s try to celebrate beer.

Secondly, when we celebrate the beers we love, let’s do that, rather than constantly using what they’re not as a frame of reference. Because you know what? It’s lazy, and it comes across as really insecure.

I look forward to all your positive, inclusive and constructive comments, people.

Wikio Rankings - February

2011-03-06T08:52:00.000Z

It's all change in the Wikio rankings - not sure what's going on!

1	Pencil & Spoon
2	Pete Brown's Blog
3	Beer Reviews
4	Master Brewer at Adnams
5	Bibendum Wine
6	Zythophile
7	Drinking Outside The Box
8	Reluctant Scooper
9	Sour Grapes
10	The Wine Conversation
11	Spittoon
12	Tandleman's Beer Blog
13	Are You Tasting the Pith?
14	Called to the bar
15	Raising the Bar
16	Rabid About Beer
17	Thornbridge Brewers' Blog
18	The Good Stuff
19	The Pub Curmudgeon
20	Real Brewing at the Sharp End

Ranking made by Wikio

Congrats to Young Dredge for making the top spot.

Interesting to see some wine guys making a much stronger showing than they have over the last year or so - this can only be encouraging in terms of diversity etc.

I'm also really pleased to see brewers' own blogs making an increasingly strong showing, with Adnams, Sharps and Thornbridge in there - not sure what's happened to Brew Dog!

Off the back of hosting The Session, Reluctant Scooper shows a strong rise. If you've never read him before, please take the chance to do so now.

Calling all beer writers: major new beer writing competition announced

2011-03-02T18:05:00.001Z

Oxford Brookes University and Wells and Young’s have come together to offer £2000 Bombardier Beer prize for writing on “the joys and jolliness of beer”

Bombardier Beer and Oxford Brookes University today announce the launch of a new competition with a £2000 cash prize offered for the best piece of writing about beer and its role in society.

The competition is open to anyone who writes about beer – or aspires to do so – from mainstream journalists and the top names of the beer-writing world, to young bloggers and as-yet-unpublished enthusiasts.

The judges are asking for a piece of up to 1500 words on the subject of beer’s role in society, or as writer, food critic and competition judge Charles Campion puts it, “the joys and jolliness of beer”, and beer’s role as a social lubricant.

“We’re not looking for technical writing, campaigning tracts or extracts form guidebooks,” continues Campion, “beer is the most sociable drink in the world and doesn’t get fair recognition. This prize is an attempt to help change that.”

As well as Campion, judges will include Paul Wells from Wells and Young’s who are sponsoring the prize, Donald Sloan, the Chair of Oxford Gastronomica at Oxford Brookes University, and Pete Brown, writer and winner of the Michael Jackson Gold Tankard Award for Beer Writer of the Year in 2009.

The closing date for entries will be Friday 1st April 2011. The winner will then be announced at the 2011 Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on the evening of Friday 8th April, during a dinner and reception at the Oxford Malmaison Hotel

For full details on format of entries and submission process contact Razia Nabi (rnabi@brookes.ac.uk)

I was very honoured to be asked to be one of the judges - until I found out about the size of the prize and realised I couldn't enter. Good luck!

Proud of British Beer

2011-03-01T14:47:00.000Z

We have a curious relationship with pride in Britain.

Maybe it's guilt over our colonial past. Maybe it's British understatement. Or maybe the notion of national pride has been so poisoned by the Daily Mail, UKIP and the far right, that we are scared of sounding boorish and nationalistic. We don't know how to be proud without sounding arrogant and objectionable - even though it's something other countries seem to manage with ease.

Why else does St Pancras station - a magnificent British building - try so hard to be French? There are no English pubs or shops at the stations on the other end of the Eurostar, in Paris Gare du Nord or Brussels Midi, and nor should there be - they are our points of entry to exciting foreign countries with different cultures and cuisines than ours. But St Pancras is half-French - it's almost apologising to travellers for arriving in Britain, with its champagne bar, Des Vins Cafe, Crepeaffaire, Paul, and Pain Quotidien.

Why else does Britain have fewer local food and drink items protected by European Protected Designation of Origin status (PDO) in total than France has for cheese alone? Far fewer even than germany or Portugal? Why do 'British' delicatessens stock Italian and French cheeses but no English cheeses? Come to think of it, why are we calling them delicatessens?

Why, as I pointed out last year, can an American brewer rhapsodise about how Britain is the only nation on earth able to consistently brew beers of such quality and depth of character and flavour as real ales, at alcohol levels below 4% ABV, when you rarely hear moderate and reasonable British people expressing a similar opinion?

It's a weird one. And it's a condition that's being tested again today by the launch of SIBA's answer to last year's American 'I am a craft brewer' film. It's simply called 'Proud of British Beer', and here it is:

Proud of British Beer from Society of Independent Brewers on Vimeo.

SIBA chairman Keith Bott said, "Nobody could have made a more convincing, compelling case for British beer than the brewers captured on this film. Their pride in their beer, and the pubs that sell it, jump out from every frame and will be felt, and we hope shared, by all who view it.”

Personally, I love it. But then I would - I wrote the script. And while we're on the theme, I'm proud to have been asked. I'm proud to have contributed. I'm proud to be a part of this film.

It was pulled together in an incredibly short space of time on a small budget, and I think everyone involved did a grand job.

It's designed to raise awareness, and to lobby MPs, most of whom are emphatically not proud of beer (the House of Commons shop sells a variety of souvenir wines - bottled in France - but no souvenir beer). There's an alternative version with a different ending that challenges politicians, asking why they would commit to duty increases that massacre pubs, create job losses, hurt one of our last manufacturing industries, and actually result in lower revenue to the treasury.

The film has been leaked early on Twitter, before its press launch. Some of the early comments already illustrate the problem we have with pride, the discomfort we feel with people who express it. Please, if this is your initial reaction on watching the film, challenge yourself on it. I'm not asking you to lie if you think there are serious flaws in how it has been made, but try to overcome that difficult pride thing and at least judge it on its merits.

If you do like the film, and if you are proud of British beer, then please get the embed code from the Vimeo link above and post it on your blog. If you are a brewer, or CAMRA, or a trade press magazine, or any other beer body, put internal politics to one side. Forget the fact that it's not just talking about real ale, or it features a macro brewer, or you weren't asked to be in it. Post it. Talk about it. Publicise it. And help get the message out to as broad an audience as possible.

Alternatively: take the piss. Parody other people's efforts to help save and promote British beer while you sit on your arse and do nothing. But don't then complain when you're favourite pub closes, or your favourite beer is no longer brewed.

Come on people. If we don't start to show some pride in what we do then basically, we're fucked. Let's try being a little positive for a change.

Beer judging and Burton on Trent

2011-02-23T09:26:00.000Z

We shot this month's video blog in Burton on Trent at the Brewing Industry International Awards, a prestigious competition that's back after a six year absence. 800 beers from around the world judged only by active brewers - no beer writers, no industry figures, this was about excellence, peer-to-peer.

And there wasn't too much emphasis on beers being 'to style'. The focus was on 'is this a great well-made beer?' and 'is this a beer that drinkers would/should love?'

Anyway, the competition took place in the reopened national Brewery Centre in Burton - a great location to talk all things beer. We talked to Steve Wellington in the new William Worthington Brewery and tasted a couple of beers.

Hope you enjoy!

Pete Brown's Beer Blog

Some thoughts on writing about beer history

The Rules of Drinking

Brew Dog London opens!

Someone is wrong on the internet.

Blogging, ethics and payola - what is OK?

Bastards: a cautionary tale

Dank

The Most Essential Beer Book You Can Buy (apart from any of mine of course)

Ten initial observations about the Great American Beer Festival 2011

A jolly weekend in Cockermouth (stop sniggering at the back)

The Cask Report: everything you ever wanted to know about cask ale, launches today

Social Media Beer Tasting - Tonight! In fact, in about 7 minutes!

Me and Mr Flintoff

Elbow: From "Build a Rocket Boys" to "Brew a Beer, Boys"!

Shameless Self-Promotion

First ever International Cider Festival - this weekend in Wales!

FINAL Video Blog - It's August. It's GBBF!

IPA Day: the morning after the night that didn't happen for me

Cheers to International IPA Day

Perfect Pub Service - how to charm and delight your customers in one easy move

July Video Blog: Scotland!

Do women need their own beer?

China, crap ads, good pubs and Depeche Mode - my recent trade press rants

Craft Beer and US-Russian Relations

June Video Blog: Celebrating the Great British Summer in Cornwall!

Surviving the Great Baltic Adventure

Off up the Baltic

Confused cognitive pathways and books and beer

Hops and Glory with Curious Brew IPA

The Flying Inn by GK Chesterton with Brentwood Summer Virgin

London Fields by Martin Amis with Brew Dog Avery Brown Dredge

‘Neath the Mask by John M East with Curious Brew Porter

Honourable mention: Westerham Little Scotney Pale Ale

CAMRA. Shotgun. Foot. Again.

May Vlog: East Anglia

Stoke Newington Literary Festival gets its own exclusive beers - got a name for them?

Bombardier Beer Writing Competition winning entry: The Stonemason's Tale

April Vlog: Burnley and Moorhouses

Exclusive: Wanted - New Brewer For One of World's Best Beers

So I drank some Stella Cidre...

Beer 'not appropriate' for Royal Wedding

Britain still refusing to drink itself to death - despite media insisting it is

O-Lordy - caught on the hop(s) in the Welsh Valleys

Introducing "Shakespeare's Local" - my next book!

Bombardier Beer Writing Prize - ladies and gentlemen, the winner!

Wikio beer and wine blog rankings: March

AB-Inbev *hearts* Goose Island. So now what do we do?

Brew Dog hires rank amateurs to create its latest beer

Beer duty: the facts, presented handily

Chancellor punches beer and pubs in the face with one hand - but gives us a clever gift with the other

Champagne beers: they're lovely!

Video Blog: The SIBA Conference

Stunning hypocrisy proves alcohol regulators simply don't get the point.

The strange relationship between the Local and the Regular

Happy Paddy's Day!

Celebrating the Beer Hunter

All at sea again: Imperial Russian Stout is coming home.

We've got to acc-en-tu-ate the positive

Wikio Rankings - February

Calling all beer writers: major new beer writing competition announced

Proud of British Beer

Beer judging and Burton on Trent

AB-Inbev hearts Goose Island. So now what do we do?