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Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Writing about beer and pubs since 2007


We’ve seen things… you people wouldn’t believe… Sambucas on fire*off the Old Street roundabout…*We watched EPOS systems*glitter in the dark near the Arndale Centre. All those… moments… will be lost in time, like *koff**tears… In… Rain. Time… to round-up…

→ Saved to Pocket this week,*an interview with Martin Hayes, founder of the Craft Beer Company*chain of pubs and bars.*On ‘craft beer’: “I kind of hate the term now.”
→ We’ve also saved this 1200-word piece from the New York Times*on White Labs and the farming of speciality brewing yeasts. (Yeast in the NYT! And not bloody beard or underpants yeast, either — proper yeast!)
→ There’s yet more coverage of beer on the BBC news website with this profile of Croydon’s The Cronx brewery. It’s a weirdly uncritical, rather pointless piece that seems to have escaped from the Morning Advertiser but, hey, it’s beer on the Beeb.
→ Thornbridge and Waitrose have launched a national home brewing challenge: submit three bottles of your home brew to Thornbridge by 31 July for a chance to have it brewed professionally.
→ A follow-up to our Boddington’s Bitter post, how about this shot of a very modern pub, from c.1978? (Note the two young men trying to work out if their beer is ‘straw-coloured’ or just light brown.)
The Boddington Arms, Wilmslow, Cheshire (photo by John Howarth from, '200 Years of Beer', Boddington's, 1978) pic.twitter.com/cSfxIpp9zE
— Boak and Bailey (@BoakandBailey) May 29, 2014
There’s a bit of a brouhaha brewing at Shepherd Neame, which offers*an interesting glimpse into the tensions behind the running of a British family brewery.
→*And, finally, if you’re out and about in Cornwall today, the St Ives beer festival is on until this evening.
News, Nuggets and Longreads 31/05/2014


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