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A week into October, here’s a round-up of everything we posted in September 2014, with follow-up information here and there.

→ We started the month by reflecting on BrewDog’s status: in our opinion, they are important,*even if they’re not always likeable.
→ What did ‘winey’ mean to Victorian commentators on food and drink?
→ For the 91st beer blogging session, we recalled learning about Belgian beer with draught Leffe in East London. (The round-up of all the posts from this session is at Belgian Smaak.)
→ We were so impressed with bottles of Sam Smith’s Taddy Porter that it prompted an entire project: tasting British bottled porters to decide which, if any, are better — Batch 1*(Fuller’s, Redemption, Meantime/M&S)* | Batch 2*(BrewDog, Five Points, Brew by Numbers).
→*100 words on hype and prejudice: ‘I like*things.*You over-rate*things. They are fanboys.’
→ Do people really want to drink local beer, or are they actually after*native styles? (Partly in response, here’s Stan Hieronymus on indigenous beers.)
→ At long last, we have our hands on that*terrible, forbidden volume detailing the manufacture of Watney’s beers in the 1960s and 70s. The first fruits of our dissection are*this guidance for brewing your own clone of the fabled Red Barrel as it was c.1966, and this piece on how to taste beer with complete objectivity.
→ The ongoing*‘crafting up’ of the Wetherspoon chain of pubs continues apace.*(The Devil’s Backbone IPA, it seems, is brewed at Banks’s in Wolverhampton, though you’d struggle to find that out from the Spoons website.)
→ Some more time travel: in 1861, an anonymous author attempted to explain Belgian beer to British readers; while, in 1944, a social commentator described the workings of the village inn.
→ If a beer is rotten when served at the wrong temperature, how good can the underlying product actually be?
→ A detail in a leaked document from AB-InBev caught our eye: they think (perhaps rightly) that craft beer is off-putting to many consumers because it is complicated and pretentious, and see this as a gap in the market. This turned into a discussion about whether a beer’s back story ‘matters’, which, elsewhere, Stephen Beaumont has wisely answered thus:
When I’m reviewing a beer or a spirit, I don’t care where it comes from and rate everything on the same as-objective-as-possible scale…*[But] when I’m choosing where to spend my dollar ‘votes’ as a consumer, I consider several other factors besides.
→ Feeling moody about the state of beer writing, we put our glumness into words. Alan McLeod disagreed, as did many others. (On good days, we don’t even agree with ourselves.)
→ There were also weekly links round-ups, some stray quotations, a gallery of photos of brewing in Ireland c.1902,*a couple of*videos, things on Facebook, and a whole lot of Tweets.
Whitbread Hop Festival, Kent, September 1948: Kenneth Horne (right) and Richard 'Stinker' Murdoch inspect the bines. pic.twitter.com/ezHxGBRFCa
— Boak and Bailey (@BoakandBailey) September 27, 2014
The Month That Was: September 2014


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