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Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Writing about beer and pubs since 2007
West Germany, München, Oktoberfest, Bier Tent, September 1978, by Barbara Ann Spengler, from Flickr under Creative Commons. Here’s our usual Saturday morning round-up of links to accompany your steaming Weiβwurst and refreshing urn of breakfast wheat beer.

→ For All About Beer, Patrick Dawson exposes the strange world of*enthusiasts willing and able to pay*‘soul crushing’ prices to drink super-rare vintage beers, and how they go about sharing these*‘ghost wales’ with each other:
For a beer to be deemed a ghost whale, it must not only come from a deeply respected producer, but also have a scarcity that limits remaining bottles to numbers you learned to count to in kindergarten. These extraordinary near-extinct beers, such as the original ’03 batch of Cantillon’s cloudberry masterpiece, Soleil de Minuit, or Lost Abbey’s for-friends-only Veritas 005, can fetch over $4,000 apiece among private collectors.
→ Rob Lovatt, head brewer at Thornbridge, explains why the Derbyshire brewers aren’t rushing to put their beer in cans.
→ Pete Brissenden has continued his blogging frenzy in the last week. Read the whole lot, but especially this post on*‘intrinsics and extrinsics’. (Pete works at Meantime Brewing and this post, we think, reflects the personal philosophy of its founder,*British craft beer pioneer Alastair Hook.)
→ Alan*‘A Good Beer Blog’ McLeod opines on consistency as sameness — a new kind of blandness. Much as we like our beer clean-tasting and relatively reliable, we think he makes a good point about where ‘big craft’*is at.
→ Paul Bailey (no relation) has been writing a series of long blog posts about British family breweries and, more specifically, his personal*relationship with them over the course of the last 40-odd years. This piece on recent Champion Beer of Britain winners Timothy Taylor is especially good.
→ A slight piece, but interesting because it exists: wine writer Will Lyons*praises real ale and recommends three bottled bitters*in*The Wall Street Journal. (His choices are odd.)
→ We were strangely captivated by this series of articles by Janis Blower for the Shields Gazette*recalling ‘the beer boats’ which transported beer by sea from Scotland to Tyneside between the 1920s and 1950s. (*1 | 2 | 3*)
→ The Beer Nut has been in Bamberg where he captured this ironic image:
Heh. pic.twitter.com/QTWmIgfBC2
— The Beer Nut (@thebeernut) September 16, 2014
→ J. Wilson at Brewvana liked*Brew Britannia:
This book really delivered. I saw familiar threads of information, but Boak and Bailey really fleshed out the details for someone like me, who possesses only an American’s cursory knowledge (despite paying attention like a fairly high-functioning beer nerd) of what was really happening on the ground in England all these years.
→ And we think Phil did too. He’s certainly urging people to buy it.
News, Nuggets & Longreads 20/09/2014


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