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I've been known to have a pop at people or organisations that fail my World View. Perhaps too often it might be said. Just occasionally there is a complete reversal of that irritation almost to a level that makes me feel quite humble and sorry to have ever made the fuss in the first place. Of course, I'd like to think that it was my complaint that caused an apparent change of direction, but I guess I'm probably just too insignificant to make such a claim.

Last year, several of us were getting frustrated at the mainstream BBC program Saturday Kitchen and did various things to try and get at The BBC.

Today, BBC Radio 4 did a brilliant program on the American Craft beer scene, the influence of European brewing on that scene and its subsequent influence on current contemporary brewing in the UK.

Mentions of barrel aged beers, American hops, massive IBUs and the effect our silly UK taxation system has on stronger, fuller flavoured beers was very welcome. Mention of Fullers, who's John Keeling recently visited to brew our soon to be infamous collaboration, warmed my heart.

It's a great piece of program making and undoes most of my reservations about their programming. More of the same please guys, and perhaps something on the Telly too?

Listen to it on iPlayer before it gets shuffled off to an archive somewhere.

Meanwhile, hypothetically speaking, I have the ability to make a reasonable quality mp3 file of the program. Of course to do so would be breaking copy write laws, so I deny all knowledge of having done so, or offering to let anyone have a copy once iPlayer has stopped streaming it. I imagine it might also be a large file, in the region of 12Mb, probably.


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