As I commented in reposting Alan McLeod’s link to his weekly roundup, many of the prominent stories last week were best read with a British accent. Give them a read, because there are too many to repeat here.
Top of mind, for me, were these three:
– Thornbridge Brewing is keeping (part of) the Burton Unions alive. Pete Brown has that story and the role Garrett Oliver played in making this happen.
(Offering a Continental hot take, Andreas Krennmair suggests Thornbridge should use their Burton Union to ferment a Bavarian Weissbier.)
– Brewdog boss and co-founder James Watt said he would be stepping down from the top job, and Hannah Twiggs writes about “how the anarchic brewery went from progressive to problematic.” It is a long, but worthwhile, read, because you’ve probably forgotten some of what transpired during the past 17 years.
(Additional reading. A fresh post from David Jesudason: BrewDog Waterloo & sexism – ‘working here scarred me.’ BrewDog Waterloo’s female staff speak about how they were treated at the London pub.)
– Pete Brown (that guy, again!) on The Sad Demise of Worthington White Shield. “Bizarrely, all this means that to many drinkers the last surviving heritage IPA was, paradoxically, not an IPA at all. It wasn’t hazy and didn’t taste like grapefruit, so how could it be? The American Beer Judge Certification Programme (BJCP)—the self-appointed guardians of beer style definition—would seem to agree. According to their latest guidelines, the IPA category is now “for modern American IPAs and their derivatives,” specifically excluding anything that resembles beers like White Shield that gave the style its name. Apparently, IPA doesn’t even stand for “India Pale Ale” any longer; according to the style guidelines, “the term is intentionally not spelled out as ‘India Pale Ale’ since none of these beers historically went to India, and many aren’t pale.” I’m not making this up. I wish I was. Not least because I would be hailed as the finest satirist of our age.”
LEDE OF THE WEEK
It was the 90s. Life was as simple as a pair of 501 jeans and a flannel shirt.
For me, it’s a marker in time. I remember exactly where I was and who I was with when I drank my first pint of Mac and Jack’s beer. I was at a patio party at Grazie Ristorante, the long-since-closed location in Bellevue. It wasn’t a fancy affair, which is good because my hair was impossibly long and I was probably wearing the aforementioned 501 jeans and flannel shirt.
Mac himself poured that first pint for me from a red and white jockey box. I liked it. I remember thinking that it tasted like a hoppier version of Alaskan Amber, which is what all the cool kids were drinking in those days. We talked about beer and brewing. I shook my head in confusion when Mac told me the brewery was in a garage at his buddy’s house. It was the 90s. Life was simple.
— From Marking a huge milestone at Mac and Jack’s Brewery by Kendall Jones
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“When we opened, we thought, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ That was not how it ended up working out. We’ve definitely been making it up as we go.”
— Josh Martinez in Mixed Results: How Sour Ale Producers Make the Numbers Work
WHAT DO THESE BEERS HAVE IN COMMON?
Coors, Fosters, Tiger, Moretti, Lagunitas, Murphys and Beamish.
— From A visit to Heineken’s Murphys brewery
ON WRITING
So perhaps it’s not that what we write about beer has to change, at least not in the sense of the form of that writing. It might be more like we have a new opportunity to focus on truly great writing: not getting there first, so much as covering the subject beautifully; not breaking news (though of course that can be important, too), so much as understanding and explaining its nuances; not reporting on every new beer or brewery that opens (an impossibility, given our current numbers), but writing more selectively about the ones that truly matter.
— From Writing Our Way Through It by Evan Rail at Good Beer Hunting
Like fighter pilots, journalists must be well-trained and confident but without being cowboys. Meekness produces journalism as gray as dishwater and no more tasty. If journalism is ever to regain its former — and rightful — status, it must first regain its swagger.
— From The Collapse of the News Industry Is Taking Its Soul With It by Jack Shafer at POLITICO Magazine