Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog - News, Nuggets & Longreads 17 June 2017: Reflecting, Ram
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After a week off here we are again with all the news and writing about beer and pubs that’s grabbed our attention in the last seven days, from the nature of community to psychogeography.
Phil Cook works behind a bar in Wellington, New Zealand, and this week reflected on the role of bars (pubs) in the community in a post entitled*‘A bar is just a church where they serve beer…’
The ‘beer community’ is frequently celebrated as a special thing and one of the reasons this is a rewarding hobby to have, and a nice industry to work in. And that, broadly speaking, is right and true. But since switching back to bartending I’ve been struck more and more by the distinct — although obviously overlapping — nature of bar culture and the nice ways that a good one can have a community all of its own. The title here comes from an excellent Jim White song that gets stuck in my head whenever I’m pondering this and marvelling at the myriad ways that people use the bar to share little moments of celebration or of solidarity or anything in between, including weirdly heartwarming mundanity — and: beer.
(As always with Phil’s posts, the substantial footnotes are half the fun — almost material for a blog post each — so don’t skip them.)
https://i2.wp.com/boakandbailey.com/...size=650%2C416“The Piss Artist”.Alec Latham continues to use beer and pubs as a hook on which to hang ambitious attempts at*proper writing. In his most recent post he retraces the route he took to drink his first legal pint as an 18-year-old, with birth certificate in hand, 20 years ago:
In 1996, I was like a boy queuing for the fun house peeking through the canvas to glimpse the attractions within… I’d gone through the yellow pages to ring the Harrow in advance to confirm the opening times. It feels so weird writing this now. Two decades ago pubs didn’t have websites and even if they did, I had no mechanism to view them.
https://i2.wp.com/boakandbailey.com/...size=650%2C339Weldwerks Brewing Co.For*Craft Beer & Brewing magazine*Tom Wilmes has spoken to several US craft brewers about the difficulties that come with sudden adulation and consumer demand. Yes, yes, we know — tiny violins and all that — but this is a topic that interests us with, e.g., Kelham Island or Cloudwater in mind. This bit struck us as especially interesting:
All of Side Project’s beers are extremely limited releases that King himself has brewed, barrel-aged, and blended. Even if he brews larger batches and fills more barrels—which he has—many barrels just don’t perform and are discarded. Most are mixed-fermentation projects that take many months to reach fruition. He could scale up and hire more people to brew and package the beer, but all of Side Project’s beers are a product of King’s singular blending, palate, and perspective. What does he stand to lose if that changes?
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We have a copy of Pete Brown’s new book*Miracle Brew and but haven’t got round to reading it yet, hence no review.*Ed Wray has, though, and breaks it down here in nitpicking detail:
The book is a pleasure to read, and the author travels to key places, historic and contemporary, in his quest for knowledge, and consults with a wide range of experts. The fact I’d finished the book on the kindle before the hard copy arrived is testament to how much I enjoyed reading it. If you haven’t yet got yourself a copy I can certainly recommend you do… And now I’ve got the praise out of the way I can start on the anal retentive OCB Wiki style commentary on where I think he went wrong, or more information is needed.
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Peter McKerry*at Brew Geekery*seems to have found his muse: the complicated issue of gentrification. In his latest post — dashed off, by his own admission, but those are often the best kind — he reflects on how London pubs have changed during his 13 years in the city, and what that says about class and culture:
One Stoke Newington pub that has stubbornly refused to [change] is The Yucatan. When I first moved to the area it was my local in the literal sense, and it was with joy when I first walked through the doors to see Celtic memorabilia adorning every available space, including a window sticker of a young Celtic-supporting boy urinating on the jersey of our erstwhile rivals. It transpired that the pub’s manager was a Dubliner and, like me, a Celtic fan. I henceforth became a regular, with 12 pm kick-off times ensuring an extended stay. It was, and is, regarded as dodgy by some, but while it always had an ‘edge’ I always found it welcoming. It also remains the pub with the most ethnically diverse patronage I’ve ever drank in, a phenomenon more common to London’s working class pubs than its more salubrious venues.
We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again:*Glen Humphries’*‘Five things about…’ is a great format for beer reviews. Here he tastes Firestone Walker Union Jack IPA and uses it as an opportunity to reflect on bottled-on and best-before dates.
And, finally, here’s a Tweet with which we strongly agree: these glasses are crap and an absolute danger sign as far as we’re concerned — we only ever seem to encounter them in pubs that think they all that when they ain’t.
News, Nuggets & Longreads 17 June 2017: Reflecting, Rambling, Reading originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog
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