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Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that seized our wandering attention in the past week, from Fuggles to brewing family struggles.
A layperson’s-terms write-up of academic research into the British craft beer market by Maria Karampela, Juho Pesonen and Nadine Waehning provides a narrative of stagnation and stored-up problems, along with some interesting specific details:
Our research with brewers across Scotland and England found that those who identify themselves as “craft” brewers:
> Are typically beer aficionados who have decided to transform their enthusiasm into a living and set up their own businesses – with the vast majority being micro-businesses employing fewer than ten people.
> Are motivated by a lack of tolerance towards the standardised, predictable beer flavours that have so far dominated the market.
> Tend to use traditional – instead of industrial – methods to make beer and experiment with different types of beer, hop varieties, old or quirky recipes and unusual or exotic ingredients.
Via @ThurnellReadSoc
https://boakandbailey.com/wp-content...nne_heslin.jpgSOURCE: Breandán Kearney/Good Beer Hunting.To wide acclaim this week, for Good Beer Hunting, Breandán Kearney tells the sad but ultimately triumphant story of the founding of the West Kerry Brewery in Ireland:
Adrienne Heslin and Padraig Bric left their chalet in the Italian resort town of Tropea for a short snorkeling trip off the town’s beach. Heslin was using the time away to plan her artistic projects. Bric’s focus was on a potential renovation to his parent’s pub and guesthouse. Eight years previously, their son Hugo had suffered Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, dying during the night as he lay between his mother and father in bed. This holiday was for thinking about the future… Bric was a nervous swimmer, and together the couple waded into the turquoise, blanketed reefs around the Gulf of St. Euphemia, an inlet leading to the Tyrrhenian Sea.
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Scholars of hop history have been grappling with the precise history of Fuggles, one of the most famous English hop varieties, for years. What is true and what is a handy marketing myth? Now Martyn Cornell declares ‘The surprising secrets behind the origins of the Fuggle hop uncovered at last’:
Its genetic parentage has been a mystery, since it appeared to be unrelated to other English hop varieties, and the long-accepted story of when it was discovered, by whom, and when it was first launched turned out to be dubious at best. Now research by Czech botanists, and a Kentish local historian, has answered all the questions: it turns out that everything you have read until now, in every book and article, on the year the Fuggle hop was first launched has been wrong. In addition, the surprise answer to the exact parentage of the Fuggle hop turns out to be … well, read on.
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Did you know countries following the German brewing tradition had their own version of the beer sparkler that caused controversy among drinkers in the 19th century? No, us neither, but fortunately Andreas Krenmair is on hand to tell the story:
Most people think that this is probably a problem only cask beer aficionados in England face, but at least in the 19th century, lager beers in Germany and Austria directly dispensed from wooden casks were served in a similar way: besides the regular tap, a device called Mousseux-Pipe, sometimes also called Bierbrause (lit. “beer shower”), was also quite common. I’ve never seen an actual photo or illustration of one, but the descriptions of it make it sound very much like a sparkler: when beer was dispensed from a cask through the Mousseux-Pipe, it foamed up and produced a bigger, denser head… Just like its modern counterpart in England, the use of Mousseux-Pipen was not uncontroversial either: in Tyrol, the use of syringes of similar devices to create artificial foam in beer was prohibited from 1854 on for sanitary reasons. A letter to the editor in a newspaper from 1871 laments the “strict non-enforcement of this edict got rid of syringes” and popularized beer showers that produced a thick and dense foam that helped defraud customers through underpouring.
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What exactly might cause your beer to ‘gush’ out of the bottle uncontrollably on opening? Kate Bernot at The Take Out has the answers:
Some beers are bottle conditioned, meaning brewers add a small dose of sugar to the beer bottle before filling it so the yeast can continue to feed on the sugar after the beer is bottled… But if a brewer miscalculates and adds too much sugar to the bottle, the yeast will have a field day, gorging itself on sugar and creating too much carbon dioxide. Then, when you open the bottle, kaboom… “The great brewers who bottle condition their beers would simply not make that mistake,” Charlie Bamforth, distinguished professor emeritus in the University of California Davis Department of Food Science and Technology, tells me. “If it was a tiny brewery that wasn’t as in control as they should be, well…”
Finally, from Twitter, there’s this:
In first class you get helpful trilingual people coming to your seat offering to get you things from the buffet.
They’re good at carrying things on a moving train, and apologetic when they run out of cheap beer and have to upgrade your beer.
@_DiningCar pic.twitter.com/5c2e20mOa8
— Charlie (@CharlieEdmunds)
November 8, 2019
News, nuggets and longreads 9 November 2019: Gushers, Sparklers, Fuggles originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog
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