Visit the Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog site

February’s a funny month in Cornwall: everything’s closed*for refurbishment and the pubs are so quiet you can hear the bar staff *blink. This is how we survived it.

→ The month kicked off with highlights fom an account by a British brewer of his work in Belgium c.1924, including clandestine night-time pipe-fitting.
→ We blended Orval with Old Peculier to great effect; and, less successfully, with two classic bottled best bitters/pale ales. (We also inspired Ghost Drinker to have a go*and we received some reports on Twitter, too: 1 | 2 | 3.)
→ A 100-word ‘beery short read': Should we acknowledge deliberately provocative (trolling) publicity stunts by breweries, or even*‘call them out’?
→ For the 96th beer blogging Session, we considered the historic role of beer festivals, and what their purpose is today.
→*We drank new beers from St Austell at the brewery bar.
→ Multiple editions of Jeff Evans’s*Good Bottled Beer Guide*gave us some data on hop varieties in British brewing with which to play. (The results weren’t surprising.)
→*We spoke to the man who organised the very first CAMRA beer competition at the Great British Beer Festival back in 1978.
→ To accompany the BBC’s adaptation of*Wolf Hall, we devilled some ale.
→*We recorded our pub crawl in St Just, near Land’s End, with photos rather than words.
→ Whatever happened to those ‘soft’ fermented drinks that*used to sit on the spectrum between 1-3% ABV?
We've been posting these on Facebook but here's one for Twitter: a British classic. pic.twitter.com/WTuDg9fnNq
— Boak and Bailey (@BoakandBailey) February 19, 2015
→ Ron Pattinson and Peter Haydon have a joint project to brew historic London beers in London, for sale in London pubs. (London!)
→ Contrary to rumour, there are people in the UK blogoshire writing primarily about cask-conditioned beer: we highlighted three.
→ Another 100-worder: not ordering a second pint can be a form of passive protest.
→ In a series of related posts, we (a) asked which breweries people thought constituted ‘the usual suspects‘ and were thus given more than their fair share of attention; (b) considered the results; and (c) pondered whether and why London-centricity might be a problem.
So, just to be clear, is @HarviestounBrew Scottish? (Promo pic from c.1995.) pic.twitter.com/xTZ5h4H9ua
— Boak and Bailey (@BoakandBailey) February 18, 2015
→* It*turns out hops can and have been grown in Cornwall, contrary to popular belief.
→ And, finally, for #BeeryLongReads, we wrote 2,500 words on Scottish brewery Williams Bros who were doing ‘craft’ before it was ‘a thing’.
→ There were also the usual weekly round-ups of news, nuggets and longreads*and*a 1000-word email newsletter (sign up!).
The Month That Was: February 2015 from Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Over-thinking beer, pubs and the meaning of craft since 2007


More...