Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog - News, Nuggets & Longreads 06/09/2014
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Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Writing about beer and pubs since 2007
http://boakandbailey.com/wp-content/...peters_474.jpgBreakfast in the Palace, Leeds, by Bob Peters, from Flickr under Creative Commons.Here’s some stuff from around the blogoshire and beyond to read once you’ve finished stumbling through the empties in search of a scraper for your tongue.
→ Oliver Gray at Literature and Libation explores beer pricing in the US with reference to some inside information on margins and material costs:
When you slap down $7 for a pint, you’re not paying for the sum of the ingredients, no matter how exotic the hops or rich and decadent the malt profile. You’re paying for the expertise of the brewer, her time and energy, the collective work of a brewery’s staff to deliver a product that you probably couldn’t make yourself… You’re paying for knowledge, practice, patience; for brewing as a service, not beer as a food.
→*The internal workings of the Campaign for Real Ale are illuminated by Glenn Johnson who explains how pubs are selected for the*Good Beer Guide*(2015 edition out now) in his region.
→ Nathanial ‘Nate Dawg’ Southwood is angry about tasting notes:
You cannot write that a beer smells like damp field mushrooms covered in manure, tasting like spunk covered hedgerow and expect people to believe your conclusion that it was rather nice… I’m just finding it irritating, vomit inducing and just straight up bullshit. It’s not doing the industry any favours by writing such pretentious crap.
(We don’t agree with him, but plenty of others do, and it’s food for thought.)
→ We wrote an article for*Craft Beer Rising magazine on the revival of extinct British brewery brands.*It also contains pieces*by Pete Brown, Melissa Cole, Des de Moor.
→ Jeff Alworth highlights something interesting: the newsworthy 99-pack is ‘craft beer’ engaging in classic*‘big beer’ shenanigans,*‘selling packaging, not beer’.
→ Expert home brewer*Andy ‘Tabamatu’ Parker attempts to clone a beer he’s never tried and experiments with posh flavour extracts (apricot, in this case).
→ Guinness have released two new bottled porters — Dublin (3.8%) and West Indies (6%) which are now available in UK supermarkets. We’ve been sent samples and will write something more detailed when we’ve processed our thoughts, but audio reviewer the Ormskirk Baron has*already reviewed them. (West Indies | Dublin.)
→ IPA historian and expert Mitch Steele offers some thoughts on the revival of Ballantine IPA by Pabst.
→ This interactive map of global alcohol consumption preferences is simple but effective. (Via Laughing Squid.)
http://boakandbailey.com/wp-content/...ap_alcohol.pngScreenshot of interactive map.→ You’ve got a month left to watch the episode of*Alex Polizzi’s*The Fixer*in which she attempts to turn round a struggling UK microbrewery.
→ We’ve seen many variations on this image on Twitter in the last day or two so that big neon sign probably was a good way for Leeds International Beer Festival (which runs*until tomorrow) to spend their marketing budget:
News, Nuggets & Longreads 06/09/2014
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