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Here’s our pick of the most interesting, entertaining or eye-opening beer-related reading of the last week.

→ Zak Avery, who sells beer as well as writing about it, gave first-hand evidence of what he calls ‘craft creep’:
“We don’t have a brewery, we cuckoo brew at a few places. Just think of us as a wholesaler”. A quick squint at Ratebeer confirmed this, but it was news to me. And they didn’t have any beer to sell. Did I want to order off a production schedule? Err, not right now, I need to place orders with breweries who actually have beer to sell, who have committed themselves to a course, not just speculatively dipped their toes in.
→ And his colleague,*Ghost Drinker, had a rant about quality control at the breweries which supply their business.
→ Crema’s Beer Odyssey*indulged in an orgy of*cheese and beer pairing, as recounted in pleasingly geeky detail by Emma:
Each of the cheeses was gosh-darned delicious in its own right and so were the beers (which we knew before we started doing the pairings) so we were starting from a very solid platform of tastiness. Everything was going to be good, but the question was: ‘how good?’

→ Des de Moor*took up our challenge and visited the top 12 London pubs of 1967 as listed in Len Deighton’s London Dossier,*for Londonist:
Another famous pub only just survives. Every Good Friday, a young Royal Navy sailor adds a further hot cross bun to a collection hung in a net over the bar of the Widow’s Son, Bow…*Besides decaying bread the interior retains some engraved glass though much was stripped by previous landlords and you can’t avoid the whiff of neglect in a blokey, though friendly, place dominated by a pool table, big screen sport and industrial keg beer.
→ For*Eater, Sarah Baird reflected on just how much booze got consumed in the cartoons we all grew up watching:
Researchers watched every G-rated movie created between 1937 and 2000, tracking the instances of alcohol consumption in each film. Of the 81 films reviewed, a whopping 47 percent depicted alcohol use, with Sleeping Beauty taking the prize for booziest, full-length animated feature (alcohol is present for 174 seconds).
→ The Great British Beer Festival has been going on all week and the new Champion Beer of Britain is Tiny Rebel’s Cwtch. We weren’t there, and don’t recall having tasted Cwtch ourselves, but our remote read, via Twitter and other coverage, is that it’s considered a worthy winner more-or-less all round.
→ Roger Protz’s account of the early days of beer writing reminded us of the default headline, ‘Only Here for the Beer’, but this is a humdinger:
Most tortuous #GBBF2015 headline gymnastics award goes to JapanTimesco.jp with 'It’s Ale Bent For Lather As Suds Fest Fetes Brit Beer Boom'
— Ten Inch Wheels (@teninchwheels) August 12, 2015
News, Nuggets & Longreads 15/08/2015 from Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Over-thinking beer, pubs and the meaning of craft since 2007


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