Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog - News, Nuggets & Longreads 6 January 2018: There’s a New
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So it’s 2018 and apparently we’re still doing this every Saturday morning: rounding up all the news and commentary on pubs and beer that’s caught our attention in the past week so you can digest the very best with your weekend brekkers.
First, a bit of news, as broken by*Will Hawkes for*Imbibe: the industry-funded ‘There’s a Beer For That’ campaign is morphing into something else, abandoning consumer advice and engagement in favour of hard-nosed anti-beer-duty campaigning. From where we’re sitting this move makes sense: TABFT never quite came together, and bringing down the price of a pint seems to us to be about the only thing the beer industry might realistically campaign for that could increase pub-going across the board.
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This next piece was actually published last summer but passed us by until it was included in a year-end round-up from*At the Table and thus went mildly viral. In it*Megan Nolan looks back on how, heartbroken and broke after the end of an intense relationship, she fell into the arms of that notorious seducer J.D. Wetherspoon:
On weeks when I wasn’t working, I went to a Wetherspoons near my house to apply for jobs. Limitless refill coffee saw me through to lunchtime, and then a soup and half baguette for £2.30. The pub had the atmosphere of a barely-maintained care home*mid-morning. I stared in appalled awe at the elderly Irish men who congregated each day, faces livid with booze. I remembered stories my dad had told me about men in his hometown who had moved to London and failed to find regular work. They lived in abject poverty in shared bedsits, but when they came home for a visit to Ireland would scrape together enough to buy drinks for everyone at the bar – they so badly wanted to pretend they had made it. What was going to happen to me?
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We’ve been without fully functioning internet for almost a week (it’s back now) which meant we missed the window to turn a casual Tweet from New Year’s Eve into a quick blog post. Fortunately,*Alan McLeod did the heavy lifting instead, reflecting on whether the high prices being asked for old bottles of Fuller’s Vintage Ale in any way reflect it’s value:
On beer trading marketplace, if it truly had that value I should be able to sell it back to Fullers or at least my government*
retailer*for something expressing the wholesale current value. It’s been kept in a cool dark cellar and subject to optimum protection. As usual, my claims to provenance were impeccable. If I go back through my tax records I would likely be able to find the receipt for buying it. I expect it would say I spent something like $6.95 CND. Yet… the box was gone and the label encrusted with a bit of mould. Who would want that? I couldn’t sell my Captain Scarlet Dinkie toys in that condition – and I wouldn’t anyway so stop asking.
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We really didn’t know whether to link to this last piece from*Bryan Roth for*Good Beer Hunting or not. When we bookmarked it for inclusion it had yet to acquire any baggage — we just liked that it highlighted a different, less pointed idea of exclusion in the beer industry, which is to say not active harassment or directed prejudice but rather a constant background*blokeishness that might be quietly off-putting to anyone other than a certain type of blokey bloke. That’s something we recognise in the UK industry, too, though of course it takes a slightly different form here.
Since then, however, the article has generated an enormous amount of drama and criticism, ranging from nitpicking complaints about journalistic protocol and structure (it is a bit of a ramble), to the now obligatory outrage over supposed*‘political correctness’, spiced with accusations of hypocrisy.
But let’s keep this simple: we read the article, we found it interesting, it is an attempt to prompt people to do the right thing, and we admire Mr Roth’s discovery of a new angle. It’s up to you whether you wish to engage in the wider soap opera but, as an article in its own right, it’s worth seven minutes of anyone’s time.
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Manchester brewery Marble is engaged in a dispute over a lovely but confusing beer called Pint which it sells not only as a cask ale but also in 500ml cans.*Jim at*Beers Manchester offers a heartfelt, understandably partisan summary of the situation:
Because a product – a beer – has a name “Pint”, it would appear that it would be ill advised to sell it in 1/2 litre cans. Because ONE PERSON reported it as being potentially misleading. Because its name was in bold – and the measurement information was in the same size as most other canned beers… So. Change size or rename an iconic Mancunian Pale Ale? … [If] it’s the latter, I’d like the numpty who reported this to Trading Standards to reveal him/herself. And explain the thought process that leads to a small business having to change something so special to me – and many many others.
(Much as we understand the frustration, as with the Tiny Rebel situation before Christmas, we find ourselves out of step with the general mood here. For one thing, we’ve*always found Pint a pain in the arse to order in a pub — “Pint and a half of Pint, please” is vaguely amusing the first time but quickly palls — and, for another, can’t imagine anyone expecting Trading Standards, which after all has yer actual legislation to enforce, to give AB-InBev a pass*in the same situation.)
The Session, that venerable institution that some say predates the invention of the internet itself, is in a spot of bother this month as the intended host didn’t get round to organising a topic due to a small matter of California wildfires. But at the last minute one of the co-founders,*Jay Brooks, has stepped in with an emergency topic for Session #131, or rather three short topics. If you have a beer blog, or want to, now’s your chance to join in. We’ll be posting something later today.
We’re going to wrap up with one of our own Tweets — a poll, in fact, to which more than 700 people responded. For now we’re not going to offer commentary other than to say that this is a reminder of how dominant pessimistic voices can seem, and how unpersuasive they apparently are.
TWITTER POLL: How optimistic do you feel about British beer in 2018?
(It's about gut instinct so don't feel the need to overthink it.)
— Boak and Bailey (@BoakandBailey)
January 2, 2018
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