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Every Saturday we round up the most interesting writing about beer and pubs. This time we’ve got tickers, micropubs and Australia.
First, some news. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) is digging on the matter of ‘Fresh Ale’, a concept being pushed by Carslberg-Marston’s, and has now taken its complaint to the Secretary of State for Business and Trade. CAMRA chairman Nik Antona said in a letter to Kemi Badenoch:
“We are now asking the Business Secretary to step in and allow National Trading Standards to investigate Carlsberg Marston’s misleading ‘Fresh Ale’ dispense method at a national level…Of course, if Carlsberg Marston’s were interested in being transparent, they could simply serve their ‘Fresh Ales’ from keg fonts, and be proud and clear about the characteristics of the beers.”
It feels to us as if CAMRA is excited to have found an issue that it can campaign around in high 1970s style – something that, surely, almost the whole membership can agree on. (Or at least won’t care about enough to argue.) If the outcome of this is that hand-pumps become somehow legally associated with cask-conditioned beer, that would certainly be interesting. And perhaps in an election year, with a government scrambling for feel-good ‘announceables’, CAMRA might manage to pull it off.
At Beer Nouveau Steve Dunkley shares thoughts on Untappd, the social media app for beer tickers. Alongside views on the usefulness of publicans using it as a source of data there’s this astonishing anecdote from the front line:
I once had a ticker of repute come into a pub I was working in only to find out a beer he’d heard was on (and this was in the days before mobile phones, let along smartphones and apps) only to find that the particular beer he wanted to tick off had run out a couple of hours earlier. Not to be deterred, he ordered a half of something standard, and under the guise of popping to the loos, made his way to the cask storage to take the cork out of the empty and pour the yeasty, trubby dregs into a small plastic bottle to take away – purely to be able to say he’d “tried” the beer. I’d hate to think what his tasting notes might have been.
Scott Spencer at Micropub Adventures has been back to the birthplace of the micropub, Kent, and has dropped a series of posts crammed with reports from places like Sandwich, Margate and Herne Bay:
First a walk down Herne Bay Pier brings me to my first call here to “Beer on the Pier”, run by local brewery “Goody Ales”. Beer on the Pier is a wooden hut located on the pier which has a bar and seating area inside, a lovely area inside with a front room like comfy feeling, along with outside seating when the weather’s nicer (it was a bit windy today). A really nice welcome here from Elaine, and was great chatting to her and a couple of regulars in the pub. I love the wording above the front saying “I do love a beer beside the seaside”.
There’s some interesting, properly footnoted research from Franz Hofer at Tempest in a Tankard about the emergence of lager in Munich:
At first blush, the Munich Baker-Brewer Dispute might look like a curious footnote in the annals of medieval history. But it’s much more than that. Flaring up sporadically between 1481 and 1517, this inter-guild dispute is not only a colourful story, it also illuminates a momentous transformation in brewing history: the shift from top fermentation to bottom fermentation in Bavaria, and the emergence of what we now call lager. For when we zoom in and focus on what the decades-long dispute was all about, we notice something interesting: yeast… Besides furnishing us with documentary evidence confirming that medieval brewers and bakers knew what yeast was, the dispute also reveals that brewers were beginning to practice a different kind of brewing. Significantly, the yeast for this new process required more time and lower temperatures. What’s more, brewers were in the process of learning that more malt, higher hop rates, and long periods of cold storage resulted in a beer that was resistant to souring microbes during fermentation, kept longer, and, most importantly, tasted better.
This isn’t our turf or period – our contribution to the history of lager is distinctly provincial – but the various references throughout the piece give us considerable confidence.
The Old Justice, Bermondsey Wall.Ron Pattinson continues to explore and reminisce about British beer in the 1970s with a catalogue of the breweries and beers absorbed into Bass Charrington:
The company was formed in 1967 by the merger of Charrington United Breweries and Bass Mitchells & Butlers… They started the decade with a bewildering array of breweries, some quite small and many in close proximity to each other. For example, in the West Midlands and Northwest England. Heavy pruning ensued… The chairman’s insane plan was to have just two breweries, Cape Hill in Birmingham and the new brewery in Runcorn serving the whole of the UK. Which led them to closing most of their breweries. Though, when they discovered Runcorn couldn’t brew acceptable versions of some of their Northern brands, breweries such as Stones in Sheffield and the Tower Brewery in Tadcaster were reprieved.
Tandleman has been to Australia and has published a series of posts about his experience snatching pub visits between other activities. The most recent piece is about Melbourne:
Bodriggy Brewery was quite small and very welcoming, and we enjoyed the banter with the barman and locals. I even won a free pint on a (free) scratch card – well, it was a half pint, but they gave me a pint anyway. Going for a pee, I was shocked to see that behind the cosy front bar was a huge beer hall with the brewery at the back. Blimey. How had we not noticed that? Again, the staff were great – they even charged my mobile for me – and we had a fine time checking out the beers. Sadly – a recurring theme – none were remotely dark.
You can work your way back from there for more of the same in Perth, Adelaide, and elsewhere.
Finally, from BlueSky, another nugget around video games in pubs…
For more good reading check out Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday.
News, nuggets and longreads 27 April 2024: Race Across the World originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog


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