Monday 15 April 2013

No war between nations, no peace between glasses?

Craft keg fans have been spluttering into their schooners of late. First there was the outrage about the entertaining rant against craft keg in a Wandsworth Common Beer Festival programme (behind away for Easter I didn't get to the latest festival but I did enjoy the author's previous effort).

Then the BBC went and said that craft beer is often pasteruised, which, as with the Wandsworth programme, lead to furious denunciations of CAMRA, despite the fact neither were written by CAMRA.

As I'm as likely as the next man to get offended by an ill informed rant about cask beer I do feel a bit bad about enjoying the spectacle of people getting so het up. But I guess, like preference for how beer is served, it all comes down to personal taste.





10 comments:

  1. Yep, it's funny how CAMRA has painted self into such a corner isn't it? It's almost like they're happy to have made themselves a byword for reactionary, narrow-minded, keg-bashing. So that nowadays, all response to keg-bashing is directed at them, even when they didn't originate it. Most enjoyable.

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    1. Hmmm...not sure painted self into a corner is quite right.

      More just not updated its definition slightly since a small number of small brewers started making unpasteruised/unfiltered keg beers. CAMRA does seem to move slowly.

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    2. It's funny, isn't it, how some people seem to see CAMRA as some huge, dictatorial monolith, full of fuddy-duddies with beards and jack-boots. As if the self-proclaimed vanguard of modernity can't conceive of a single organisation having a diversity of opinion within it.

      Or maybe it's the need to set up a straw Stalin so the cask-bashers can tell themselves how cruelly oppressed they are. Ah well, I guess it shows there's conspiracy fantasists everywhere in this debate. As you say, most entertaining.

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    3. Criticism of CAMRA does seem to veer wildly between it being some all powerful illuminati like conspiracy and being totally irrelevant.

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  2. Really not sure why everyone was so angry. We thought the Wandsworth rant was interesting rather than annoying, and it's not as if it was all that widely distributed... at least not until someone scanned it and put it on Twitter so everyone could be angry about it!

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    1. A lot of people do seem to feel quite strongly about this craft keg thing. Fortunately I'm not one of them.

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  3. Why do you think people get so het up? I understand caring about what you drink. Wanting something you like and not being offered only things you don't? Why does it matter what the next guy drinks?

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    1. I think the term is 'tribalism'. When beer becomes a hobby, not just something you drink, people often seem to identify with a particular beery subculture.

      I don't think people get het up about what other people drink though, it's more when their favoured beer type is dissed by someone from another beery subculture.

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  4. Hi Ed! stumbled over your blog while looking for wild hop sites in Yorkshire. Nestor Makhno enjoying a nice frothing pint made me chuckle! No Pasaran!

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