Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog - News, Nuggets & Longreads for 1 April 2017: China, Crea
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Here’s all the*beer news, beer writing and beer blogging that’s caught our attention in the past seven days, from China to Bamberg.
For*Fortune magazine*Scott Cendrowski*reports on AB-InBev’s approach to cracking the Chinese market, where a lack of competition regulation makes it easy to lean on smaller brewers:
John Guy, a quick-talking Australian whose *McCawley’s chain of bars in southern China had sales last year topping $10 million, says he has heard of bar owners being offered 1 million yuan (about $150,000) to switch all their draft beer to AB InBev brands. Guy prides himself on his range of overseas craft beers and says he would never accept such a deal. But other bar owners don’t have the same choice. ‘Some bars run at break-even and make money on tap bonuses—$15,000 a year on some,’ he says.
(Via @thebeernut.)
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Continuing the theme*Steve Body at*The Pour Fool has a typically entertaining, eccentric, fire-spitting*tirade against AB-InBev*which concludes that they’ve forever defiled the term*‘craft beer’ and are therefore welcome to it. Here’s his account of AB-InBev’s provocative party line, delivered by what Body calls a ‘suit’ who somehow, creepily, acquired his mobile phone number:
‘You should know that we consider the term “craft brewing” a misnomer. “Craft brewing” is what WE do. “Craft” implies precision and skill and the adherence to the proven standards and techniques of brewing. What all these little breweries do is amateur brewing.’
(His proposed alternative*term is*‘indie beer’ which, of course, has been around for years, along with many other variants.)
http://boakandbailey.com/wp-content/...cream_beer.jpgAdapted from an image at A Better Beer Blog. Alan McLeod*at*A Better Beer Blog*(the artist formerly known as*A Good Beer Blog) has been investigating the term*‘cream’ as used in relation to beer over the years. His conclusion? As we read it, it’s that historically there is no fixed meaning, or even continuity — it’s just*an appealing sounding word that helps to sell beer:
When you consider all that, I am brought back to how looking at beer through the lens of “style” ties language to technique a bit too tightly for my comfort. The stylist might suggest that in 1860, this brewery brewed an XX ale and in 1875 that brewery brewed an XX ale so they must be some way some how the same thing. I would quibble in two ways. Fifteen years is a long time in the conceptual instability of beer and, even if the two beers were contemporaries, a key point for each brewery was differentiation. The beers would not be the same even if they were similar.
(See also: golden ale.)
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Feeling somehow related is a post from*Phil Edwards at*Oh Good Ale! in which he highlights the fragility of the identity of any given beer over time, especially where takeovers and mergers play a part:
[From]*the moment a brewery is taken over, its beers are effectively dead. More precisely, from the moment a brewery is taken over, its beers may cease to exist – or be replaced by inferior substitutes – at any time, and there’s nothing anyone outside the new owner company can do about it. The new owner hasn’t bought beers, it’s bought brands and their market share. If the new owner is genuinely committed to making decent beer, the beer backing up those brands may continue to be good, but even that can’t be guaranteed – and, of course, the new owner can’t actually be held to account by anyone else. Even when the new owner continues to make a particular beer the old way, nobody can tell whether they’re going to start cutting corners or simply stop making it – let alone stop them doing so.
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For the record, but rather tedious:*Those of you who follow the*Midlands Beer Blog Collective or, indeed, read these round-ups of ours every Saturday, will have heard about BrewDog’s trademark run in with a Birmingham pub several weeks ago, but the story only blew up in the mainstream in the last week via Rob Davies*in the*Guardian. If you’re after a soap opera, here it is: James Watt of BrewDog responded; there were claims, counter-claims and calls for boycotts; and lots of people made essentially the same observation:*‘Not very punk, guys!’
Our take? We don’t think this does any more harm to BrewDog than any previous PR disaster — indeed, it contributes to the Main Objective — and it seems astonishing to us that there are still people out there who are surprised to discover that James Watt is a pragmatic businessman rather than a maverick freedom fighter.
Twitter Intel
Drip-drip-drip… Earlier this year Cloudwater triggered a scare around the health of cask ale. Now, from*Melissa Cole, here’s news of another bruise that may or may not be a symptom of a more serious ailment:
Interesting: another brewery
@BellevilleBrew halting cask production soon (merely an observation & the beers suit keg better anyway)
— Melissa Cole (@MelissaCole)
March 30, 2017
News, Nuggets & Longreads for 1 April 2017: China, Cream, Cask originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog
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