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Here’s everything on beer and pubs we felt the urge to bookmark in the past seven days, from coolships to kask kontroversy.
Joe Stange is now writing for Craft Beer & Brewing and has announced his arrival with an excellent piece on Franconia which succeeds in finding some new angles on this much-written-about beer region:
Here is another thing you can see upstairs, in the attic: a wide, riveted copper coolship… Or rather: You can see it, until the boiling-hot wort hits the pan—littered with a surprising amount of hops pellets for a burst of aroma—and opaque steam rapidly fills the attic. After that, it’s difficult to see anything in there for a while. This coolship is the kind of thing you might expect to see in a lambic brewery, or in an ambitious American wild-beer brewery, or in a museum. Its original purpose, however, has nothing to do with sour beers. It is simply an old-fashioned way to cool wort. Andreas Gänstaller uses it every time he brews lager… “The wort streams out really clear,” he says. “The beer is much more clear because all the bad stuff goes away in the steam.”
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If you’ve ever fancied organising a bottle share, or wondered exactly what a bottle share is, then you’ll find this primer by Rach Smith at Look at Brew useful. In in, she explains how the bottle share she runs in Brighton works, and offers tips on setting up your own:
Think about the order in which you’ll be pouring. If there are pale/low abv beers for example, start with them and leave the big, bold Imperial stouts for last so you don’t completely destroy your taste buds early on… [And] don’t judge. It’s not about who can bring the rarest beers, it’s about socialising, learning a little bit along the way and having a damn good time.
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An interesting point from Ed – could the reason cask beer numbers are down be because we lost a few big brands that made up the bulk of the numbers, such as Boddington’s?
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With #FlagshipFebruary in mind (see last week’s round-up) Kate Bernot has written about consumer promiscuity for The Takeout:
“I say this whole idea of promiscuity and no brand loyalty is grossly misdefined,” says Lester Jones, chief economist for the National Beer Wholesalers Association. “It was pretty easy 25–30 years ago to find a brand that you liked and trusted and had relations to. I don’t think people have changed, I think it’s just taking longer to sift through the multitude of choices.… Instead of accepting the fact that their job is a lot harder, it’s easy for brewers to turn and say ‘The consumer is fickle. He doesn’t know what he wants.’ No, the consumer knows what he wants and the consumer is tasting to find what he wants, but given so many choices, it just takes longer,” Jones says.
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All this is well and good but what people really want to know is this: where’s the beef at? Well, Jessica Mason wrote this piece arguing that the embrace of cask beer by the likes of Cloudwater signals a resurgence in the health of its image…
[Cloudwater’s Paul] Jones [says] that a lot of traditional breweries up and down the country are ‘complete pros and legends’ within cask beer, even if they’re not turning their hands to more modern beer styles. ‘I think something of a hybrid offering from us really ought to diversify what cask beer is and what it could be in the future.’
Wild Card’s head Brewer Jaega Wise, who recently won the title of Brewer of the Year, will be relaunching its cask-beer offering next year. However, she stresses that it will be on the brewery’s terms, reminding how modern brewers are reiterating cask’s relevance, but are not willing to bow to outdated stereotypes.
…which prompted this comeback from Tandleman:
So we need modern craft brewers to show us the way and revive cask? These are the same people that give you cask beer that looks like chicken soup and undermine the work done by brewers for many years to ensure clean, clear, bright beer with distinct flavours.We’d more or less lost the “It’s meant to be like that” nonsense until craft got its hands on cask. Now it is back with a vengeance, as overturning the orthodoxy has given bar staff the right to say it once more, even if the beer looks like a mixture of lumpy fruit juices and smells like Henderson’s Relish.
More point/counterpoint than beef, really, but it’s fascinating how the fault lines (cultural, generational) continue to reveal themselves in new forms.
And finally, there’s this reminder of how many opportunities for disaster are built into the cask ale supply chain:
The quality of cask beer is hard enough to maintain in trade without crooked wholesalers extending shelf life by forging cask labels!This label looks amateurish & the beer probably tasted poor. How dare they try and ruin our reputation. We need to name and shame!
@CAMRA_Official pic.twitter.com/hxBSo6tqzD
— Dan Scott Paul (@BlackSheep_DSP)
January 14, 2019 As ever, for more links, checkout Stan on Mondays (usually including lots of stuff beyond beer, but still about beer) and Alan on Thursday (generally threading links together to make some sort of point).
News, Nuggets and Longreads 19 January 2019: Bottleshares, Boddies, Brand Loyalty originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog
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