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It’s Friday night but, because we’re catching an early train to visit the Eden Project, perhaps stopping off at St Austell Brewery to try the new stout and the gose, here’s a premature Saturday morning round-up.

→ For the*Guardian, Ben Walters wrote about the declining numbers of gay pubs, and pondered whether this is good news (pubs in general are more welcoming) or bad. (Via @kmflett.)
→ Tandleman evoked a pre-Christmas evening in a Franconian pub:
A couple of accordion playing dudes are giving Deutsche Blasmusik their all, while the crowd – some of them at least –* sing along, or tap their tables enthusiastically. Along the front of the pub, which somehow seems like the back wall, a group are playing Skat – or it could be Schafkopf, both of which are popular German card games of impenetrable rules, that, whichever it is, involve a lot of noisy shouting and table thumping.
→ Ahead of this year’s General Election, James Nicholson offered a helpful summary of the main UK political parties’ stances on alcohol and the problems of national alchol policy:
Historically, Tory support for market freedom and connections with the brewing trade have clashed with moral conservatism and the desire to be tough on social disorder; Labour’s traditional instinct for business regulation risks looking like an attack on popular cultural activities when it adds to the cost of a pint.
→*For the*New York Times, Ian Mount talked to*US brewing industry figures about the likelihood of an imminent end to the ongoing craft beer boom. (Via @agoodbeerblog, whose commentary is here.)
→ An interesting development: a London bar focusing exclusively on Italian craft beer. We can see this being (a) really hip and (b) starting a trend for regionally-specific craft beer bars.
→ Jeff Pickthall dug out a craft beer manifesto*his brother, Steve, wrote on Usenet back in 2002. (Contemporary with their running of Microbar in South London described in Chapter 12 of*Brew Britannia.)
→ We don’t live in America and we don’t identify as Craft Beer drinkers (capital C, capital B, face tattoos,*T-shirts) so the Budweiser Superbowl advert controversy left us cold, but, for the record, Stan Hieronymus has rounded up some of the many, many responses here.*Our*favourite discovery, though, was*this resurfaced and newly-relevant 2013 piece by Tom Acitelli*about an earlier run-in between Anheuser-Busch and the ‘craft community’ back in 1996.
→ Mwahahahahahahaha!
Getting on the blended beer train. It’s all @BoakandBailey’s fault pic.twitter.com/ARvyzLMGBx
— Stuart Harrison (@pezholio) February 5, 2015
News, Nuggets and Longreads 07/02/2015 from Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Over-thinking beer, pubs and the meaning of craft since 2007


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