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Here’s everything that grabbed our attention in the past week, from a very significant big brewery takeover to a bunch of priests on the lash.
The big news this week —*really big news — was the takeover of San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing by Sapporo of Japan. Depending how you look at it, Anchor has a claim to being patient zero in the craft beer boom of the past half-century, and so this does go a bit beyond just another takeover. There’s been lots of analysis but our favourite piece is by a local writer,*Esther Mobley, for the*San Francisco Chronicle:
In San Francisco, the emotional stakes are especially high when it comes to Anchor. Not only is it*our*brewery — our first, our signature — but it’s America’s original craft beer. It’s an icon of independence, and has seemed, at least we thought, large and established enough to be insulated from the pressures that have forced others to sell.
For Left Lion*Benedict Cooper has written a wonderful account of his pilgrimage from an English pub to its twin in Continental Europe:
I’ve been in the Poacher I prefer not to recall how many times, but I’d never noticed the brass plaque on one of the walls until one slow, winter evening this year. Sitting at the long table, I found myself reading:
The Lincolnshire Poacher
Nottingham, England
Twinned with
In De Wildeman
Amsterdam, Netherlands
It feels as if more pubs ought to be twinned — does anyone know of others?
Alec Latham has been pondering again: why is it, he asks, that a half-pint glass full of beer feels like much less than half a pint of beer?
[A] pint goes down in gradations as you nurse it and watch the level of others’ if you’re in company.
A half should stretch to fifty per cent of that time but seems like several mouthfuls. Half a pint – the reality – doesn’t last as long as half a pint – the notion. In other words, a half isn’t as much as half of a pint. Do you follow?
Maybe that’s why it’s often prefixed with ‘swift’.
Richard Coldwell revisited a once favourite pub only to be dismayed at the changes it had undergone, prompting some reflection on how fragile the unique identities of pubs, beers and neighbourhoods can be:
There’s plenty other pubs who laid claim to have sold the best Tetley’s in Leeds. In fact depending on who you talk to, everyone will have their own idea, but that’s life for you. If you’ve never experienced Joshua Tetley’s Bitter, the real mccoy, then you’ve never lived. A smooth, creamy pint of beer that created a plimsoll type gauge down the glass denoting the length of each slurp. The creaminess was created by the autovac system that recirculated the beer back into the beer engine as it overflowed from the glass into the trough like drip tray. I’ve read a lot about people’s thoughts on autovacs, mostly from the kind of folk with that modern OCD based, you’ve just touched someone wash your hands, wash them again, turn round three times to the left, jump to the right and you won’t catch any germs kind of attitude; recycled beer never did me any harm.
This is a classic silly season story but irresistible nonetheless, not least because of the pure Father Ted-ness of it all: a Cardiff pub this week attempted to eject a party of priests having mistaken them for a costume-wearing stag party.
A couple of other bits of news, just for the record: the Craft Beer Co, which owns pubs across London and (a bit) beyond, has quietly closed its Clapham branch; and Purecraft has closed its Nottingham branch.*Not evidence of a crisis, we don’t think, so much as pragmatic business decisions. But, still.
And, finally, the customary pick of the Tweets to sign off:
News, Nuggets & Longreads 05 August 2017: Anchor, ‘Arf Pints, Amsterdam originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog
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Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog - News, Nuggets & Longreads 05 August 2017: Anchor, ‘Arf
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