Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog - October 2015: The Month That Was
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Here’s everything we wrote in October, from in one handy round-up, from ‘lock-ins’ to wood smoke. (Lots about the 1960s this month for reasons that will soon become clear…)
→ We started the month by flagging an appeal from the Oxford English Dictionary research team which is trying to find an earlier usage of the phrase ‘lock in’ than 1991.
→ Kicking off what turned out to be a mild focused month we gave a blunt explanation for why British brewers might be more interested in making Gose than mild.
→ The quest for the solution to the ‘lock in’ question led us to a*book from 1936 jam-packed with pubs, beer and encounters with fascists.
→ We rather like Falmouth’s new craft beer bar, Mono. (We’ve been back since and enjoyed it even more;*you can read another take from ‘Retired Martin’ here.)
→ Unearthing a bit of 20-year-old gossip satisfied our curiosity about why former Good Beer Guide editor*Andrea Gillies doesn’t have much to do with CAMRA these days.
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→ La Brasserie Artisanale de Nice brews some interesting beer of great promise.
→ BrewDog’s attempt at Altbier struck us as*convincingly dull.
→ We announced our*bottled mild taste-off season*and posted the first round of notes, on beers from Norfolk.
→ If you want to put a head on your beer, here’s (ahem) ‘one weird trick’ that might help.
→*Should we worry about the impermanence of online beer writing? (With some notes on how the much-missed*Oxford Bottled Beer Database came to be.)
→ There’s a new Midlands-based beer blog collective and they’re looking for contributors.
→ In 1966, an anonymous writer laid bare the market research practices behind the blanding-out of British beer. (John Keeling of Fuller’s linked to this piece in his*first*blog post for*Craft Beer London.)
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→ Another Artyfact from the Nyneties is an advertisement inviting you to ‘Meet Pete’ — that is, Pete Slosberg of Wicked Ale fame, whose big personality took Britain by storm.
→ Working our way through 1960s Batsford guides we gleaned some nuggets from*East Anglian Pubs by Vincent Jones. (Paul Bailey wrote about this series of books back in 2012.)
→ Eldridge Pope’s Thomas Hardy Ale was one of the first poshly-packaged, exorbitantly priced limited edition bottled beers*as a 1968 column by wine writer Cyril Ray revealed.
→ More from Cyril Ray: a tasting of major British beer brands with a professional tea-taster and a wine-taster, also from 1968, which we acquired hoping for wine-style notes on beers long out of production.
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→ It turns out the smell of smoke, without an actual fire, is enough to make a pub feel cosy.
→ These*Guinness Time magazine covers from 1967-1971 are gorgeous and will trigger nostalgia in anyone who grew up on a certain type of British cartoon or children’s book.
→*We also updated our permanent page with a guide to gifts for beer lovers in time for Christmas 2015.
→*There were the usual weekly round-ups of interesting links: 3 October*(including our contribution to the Session; round-up here) | 10 October | 17 October | 24 October*| and 31 October (yesterday).
→ On Facebook we discussed a 1960s aftershave designed to smell like the pub, gave a brief bonus tasting note on a German bottled Altbier, and reported on an unsuccessful Orval blending experiment. (Amongst a load of other stuff.)
→ And this was our Top Tweet of the month according to Twitter’s analytics doobery:
File under 'changing attitudes to booze': a pub on the Old Pensioners' Ward at Riverside Hospital, Pembroke, c.1952.
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— Boak and Bailey (@BoakandBailey)
October 13, 2015
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