The end of a heresy

I find christian heresies fascinating and can happily spend time clicking through wikipedia reading about them. Those early christians really knew how to have major spats over obscure points. More modern times have brought such delights as sedevacantism, the gloriously bonkers belief of some traditionalists that the pope is in fact not a catholic. I am unaware of their views on whether bears shit in woods. 

But when a heresiarch founded a protestant beer sect called the Campaign for Really Good Beer (CAMRGB) in opposition to our mother church I was not filled with pleasure that I get from say, reading about nestorianism. I must confess that in my arrogance I had come dangerously close to advocating for something similar to the CAMRGB in the early days of beer blogging. Back then whinging about CAMRA was something we all enjoyed...until I realised some of the people were not whinging about the home team but were in fact the opposition. I repented my sins then, and despite my occasional confusion over theological matters and distaste for modernism, my faith has not been shaken.

The CAMRGB was explicitly named with the aim of annoying CAMRA, which seemed a bit of a dick move. It never looked like an actual organisation to me, though Boak and Bailey included it in one of their books as they thought it was. The CAMRGB blog was just one bloke reviewing beers as far as I could tell, though it also offered free membership. I never took up the offer, so can't say what you got out of it but it can't have been much. There were some CAMRGB t-shirts, and I suspect I even saw the antipope wearing one once...at CAMRA's Great British Beer Festival. I recall then craft crusader Matthew Curtis wore a CAMRGB t-shirt there: 

"I had hoped that by wearing that t-shirt I might have found myself having some interesting conversations with CAMRA members but none of them seemed to either notice or care."

And I see there were some CAMRGB "twissups", pub crawls arranged over twitter. 

But crafties have never really got grassroots organisation going. Craft beer has always looked like a petty bourgeois movement to me, i.e. a movement of small business owners. Craft beer fans did at times provide unpaid labour for craft breweries' beer festivals, and I think there are one or two non-CAMRA beer festivals organised by craft beer fans. But I not really sure what crafties could campaign for. When craft beer was new and exciting sales and availability rose rapidly so it didn't really need campaigners. In fact, crafties would at times get upset when craft beers appeared in supermarkets. Some of the upset may have come from the same source as that of indie music fans when a band signs to a major label, but part of it was definitely concern that cheaper supermarket craft beer would mean margins would fall for their brewery owner mates. See, told you it was a petty bourgeois movement!

Having something to be against can be just as important as being for something, which was certainly part of the CAMRGB's reason for existence. But the appeal of campaigning against the Campaign for Real Ale must be limited. 

CAMRA went thought a slow and tedious process to placate the heathens craft keg fans, and craft beer now seems spent as a revolutionary force. Craft beer is widely available in supermarkets, but a lot of it is made by multinationals that bought out some of the darlings of the craft beer world. Not so much to get excited about, or campaign for, there.

Doing a bit of heresy snooping I saw the CAMRGB has vanished from the internet. I don't know when it went but but it looks like it fizzled out years ago. Matthew Curtis now writes regularly for CAMRA. 

Mind your Ps and Qs

I have been delighted to see the return of beer served in quart measures, albeit in plastic skiffs at concert venues. 

Quart of beer sighted in the wild

But sadly the word quart has become archaic in British English, and there was some confusion when I asked for two pints at the bar. Did I want two separate pints or two pints in one container? If we bring back the work quart this wouldn't be a problem. 

The quarts were advertised by a sign behind the bar encouraging people to "Upgrade to a two pint cup".

The sign behind the bar

My humble suggestion is that they could start the re-education by simply adding "(quart)" to the sign after "two pint". I'm sure people would soon catch on, after all we've managed to get by a random mix of metric and imperial measurements for decades. 

Time to put the dog down?

The rise and fall of craft beer in Britain has been an interesting, and at times irritating, thing to watch. The same could be said about Brewdog, the company that made the most noise, and money, out of it. 

They seem to be circling the drain now though. A recently spate of bad news started with the (rather belated) report that they'd lost 2000 on trade accounts. Losing out to Heineken's Beavertown I suspect, as Heineken also own thousands of pubs. And speaking of pubs Brewdog have also closed a lot of theirs recently. 

The still shift a lot of beer in supermarkets, but they're not getting premium prices for their beers there. In fact, they're cheaper than the other multinational corporations offerings. I recently saw Guinness' premium product at £8.75 for a four pack...

... compared to Brewdog's stout at £4.50.

Price per litre was £3.92 for the Guinness and £2.56 for Brewdog. There was a less premium version of Guinness there too, which like the Brewdog stout was going for a sale price, but even that was £3.41.

There's a similar big gap when Brewdog undercut Molson Coors' Doom Bar, the original at £5.30 a litre...

... whereas Brewdog's coastal 4.3% ABV amber ale is £3.55 a litre. The craft beer revolution was all about making a knock off version of Doom Bar, right?

And even when Brewdog aren't undercutting the companies they claim to despise they're still the budget option in the craft section, their beers being the discounted ones:

Now it is possible I've just looked when it's Brewdog's turn in the discount cycle, but I still can't see any way this is good for them. They're still making losses and have stagnant sales. Brewdog are by far the most successful of the British craft breweries but they're still small compared to the really big breweries. Competing with them for the tiny margins of supermarket discounting is not going to solve their problems any time soon. 

How San Miguel closed Banks's brewery

Not all multinational corporations are created equal. The world's largest brewing corporation, ABInBev, towers above the others, having bought the second largest, SABMiller, in 2016. It's over twice the size of its closest competitor, Heineken, and nearly five times the size of Carlsberg. The latter is relevant to the sad closure of Banks's brewery. 

A mash tun a Banks's

Eleven years ago the two companies with rights to San Miguel beer, San Miguel Brewery (Philippines) and Mahou San Miguel (Spain) signed a cooperation agreement to promote their international businesses and position San Miguel as a global brand. To further its growth they had already partnered with Carlsberg to contract brew it in Britain, and it was a large part of the output of the Northampton brewery. 

But for a brand with global ambitions partnering with the world's biggest brewery seems like an obvious match. I have heard San Miguel eyes Brazil as a great opportunity and certainly ABInBev is very strong there from its AmBev division, whereas Carlsberg doesn't have much presence at all in the Americas. So, as what I believe is part of a global realignment, last year San Miguel moved its contract brewing in the UK from Carlsberg to ABInBev. 

Round open fermenters at Banks's

Losing the San Miguel contract left Carlsberg in the UK, which owned one giant factory and two large regional breweries, with a lot of surplus capacity. The giant factory wasn't going to go and Marston's has the small pack facilities, which left Banks's. So a contract change for a Spain and Philippines based international lager brand closed a 150 year old brewery in Wolverhampton that didn't even brew it. 

Casks at Banks's

I am dubious about supporting independent breweries over multinationals as a matter of principle. I've come across far too many scumbags in small breweries for that. But had Banks's not been part of a multinational it would still be with us. 

The closure of every historic brewery pains me. I love going round them and modern breweries just don't compare. That ABInBev in the UK has stretched its capacity to deal with the production of San Miguel has probably saved Camden Town brewery from closure, but I find that small consolation.

I'm forever blowing bubbles

A recent study on beer foam introduced a lot of people to a strange type of science: brewing research by non-brewers. I first came across this genre in a previous job when a study into brewing with bread crumbs was published. The draft had some right bollocks in it about how increasing fermentation temperature increases alcohol yield, which I was uncharitably blunt about. Looking at the paper I see it still made it into the published version so I guess they didn't take it to heart, or indeed listen to a bleedin' word I said. 

With a limited understanding of the brewing process it is likely that confusion will creep in, or indeed stomp in and trample all over your work. This has certainly happened with the foam paper, as the chorus of derision from brewers about how many times beers are fermented testified. The authors' misunderstanding about single, double and triple fermentation seems to have obscured the very obvious difference in the beers they studied: some are bottle conditioned, so undergo a secondary fermentation in the bottle, and some are not. 

In the world of brewing those that have been seduced by Satan commonly defend the diabolical practice of using extraneous CO2 to carbonate beer by saying that CO2 is CO2 wherever it comes from. Now I'm sure that a CO2 molecule coming from a gas bottle is the same as a CO2 molecule produced as god intended by fermentation in the container from which the beer is served. But this is not to say the bubbles are the same and surely even Satan's minions will have noticed that foam you get from bottle conditioned beers is different from the foam you get from artificially carbonated beers. 

Surprisingly, seeing as generally winemakers are a primitive bunch, I did once read a very interesting book on bubbles in champagne. For those not aware, champagne is bottle conditioned, with the yeast subsequently removed by riddling and disgorgement. If I remember rightly, the author put the fine bubbles of champagne down to nucleation sites from yeast fragments. It would be good to have more research into bubbles in beer, as it would provide a rare instance when science backs up the faithful. 

The authors of the beer foam paper appear to be competent scientists, even if they are ignorant when it comes to brewing. They certainly seem to know a lot about the science of bubbles (Marangoni stresses is a new one to me!). And they correctly discuss Lipid Transfer Protein 1 as playing a key role in stabilising foam, though this nothing new to brewers. In fact last year I went to a talk by "The pope of foam" Charlie Bamforth where he discussed the role of Lipid Transfer Protein and Protein Z (40 kDa) in foam stability. He said research had shown this was not due to any particular property of the proteins, but rather that the partial denaturing of them during the boil (not during secondary fermentation!) exposed their hydrophobic interior which helps stabilise bubbles.

My humble suggestion for people not from a brewing background planning to publish research into beer is to talk to a technical brewer first. It would be beneficial to all. 

Bar and music matching

Pete Brown has been banging the drum of beer and music matching for some time, and has even written a book about it. I must admit it's not something I've given much thought to, though at a push I suppose I could have a go. Obviously anything by Madonna goes with Landlord, The Selecter pairs with cask beer and I certainly hope that when I'm next drinking at Farnham Beerex I'll be listening to Wet Leg:

The person who drums for Wet Leg

I was however about a two minute walk away from bar and music matching recently. So near but yet so far!

Going to a gig in South London I checked out how close the venue is to The Shirker's Rest, and was delighted so see it's a a stone's throw away. Set up by the people behind the Deserter blog, the clue's in the name with The Shirker's Rest and it wears it's commitment to avoiding work on its sleeve. 

Hardy perennial anarchist anti-work poster

I was going to see MDC, an old hardcore punk band, who I think it's fair to say also wear their heart on their sleeve. They gained a brief flicker of fame when Green Day used their "No Trump, No KKK, No fascist USA!" slogan at an awards show. MDC did of course play the song it came from as well as other old classics, but stayed contemporary by wishing ill on the ICE police and IDF. It was when they got to I hate work I realised they should really have been playing in The Shirker's Rest. And they practiced what they preached too, only playing a 45 minute set! To be fair there had been three support bands, but I'd skipped them for the joys of a bar with a healthy attitude to work. 

The CIBD Sustainability in Brewing Conference 2025

I recently attended the CIBD's Sustainability in Brewing Conference in Nottingham. I was working so though there was plenty of networking and CPD I didn't take notes. I did take some pictures though:

This is meta or something

And a few things have stuck in my memory.

Nominative determinism from Tom Brewer

Tom Brewer from ABInBev is a big fan of cranking it up on high gravity brewing: 20-22°P (1.083-1.092 for those that use a more sensible non-sucrose based scale). My inner microbiologist was pleased to hear that despite being an engineer he accepted it might not be fermented at this gravity. He was also a big fan of simmer and strip, where instead of a rolling boil the beer is simmered and gas sparging is used to drive off unwanted volatiles. This will save a lot of energy but I've never been impressed by beers I've drunk that were boiled using energy saving techniques like this. Still, I'm sure they know what they're doing and as many of their brands are not exactly overflowing with flavour they'll have to get it right or it will be very noticeable. 

He's clearly very dedicated to his job. I would even say passionate if that wasn't something that only craft brewers are capable of feeling. He seemed disappointed that they're not making faster progress on their sustainability goals but I was impressed that 13 of their breweries have got their liquor to beer ration below two.

Greg Rachon, one of the last people still working on the brewing side at Campden BRI, gave a talk with Connor Bartlett from Adnams on research into pasteurisation optimisation and how they're looking to reduce the amount of pasteurisation units used in Adnams' beers. 

More papers on pasteurisation than you can shake a stick at

Klara the hop goddess gave an update things at Wye Hops and detailed the use of genetic markers in hop breeding. 

Klara the hop goddess

Chatting to her afterward I learnt that she's not named a hop herself yet, though she did express disappointment that Wyggle, the working name of the wilt-resistant Fuggle, was not used. 

The thing that most amazed me though was about malt not hops. Dave Griggs from Crisp Malt said that to lower water usage they're looking to reduce the number of steeps in the malting process. The greatest success of the Brewing Industry Research Foundation* was the introduction of air rests into steeping, thus increasing the number of steeps from one to two or three. This makes malting faster and more efficient but greatly increases water use, which is why they're now trying to find ways of going back to one! Science eh? Isn't it amazing!

The talks were all videoed so hopefully will be online in the not too distant future. 

*Which ended its days at the Nutfield site of Campden BRI until the bastards closed it down. The abrasion process, which also came from there and the late great Geoff Palmer was immensely proud of, failed to pass the test of time.