Hops on the radio

There was a full half hour about our little green friends on Radio 4 today. You can get it on iplayer here.

South Side, Yeah!

I was pleased to pick up a bottle of Bristol Beer Factory's Southville Hop recently. It seem highly rated by my fellow beer nerds and it won a SIBA award so I figured there must be something going for it. And indeed there was.

The first taste was of the grapefruit flavour you get from Cascade hops, but as the beer went down I thought there was something more, a bit lemoney too? Anyway it was good stuff, and I really need another bottle so I can compare it with Goose Island IPA, which I've realised is my benchmark beer for pale with American hops. It may be time for the return of The IPA Challenge!

Anything gose?

A recent tweet from gurning enthusiasts Boak and Bailey reminded me of something I've been pondering for a few months:

Did we jump straight from German-style Gose beers being almost extinct to fruit-flavoured experimental versions? Who brews a straight one?
— Boak and Bailey (@BoakandBailey) October 2, 2013

Back when I visited Amsterdam a highlight was getting to taste some beers of obscure European styles I'd never come across before, which included gose.

"a pale, top-fermenting wheat beer, flavoured with coriander and salt. There's a hefty lactic acid content and was probably once spontaneously-fermented"  

I was more than a little surprised on my return to see that an English brewery was brewing a gose, but with added gooseberries, amongst other things. As I love beer history I thought it was great that this obscure historic style was being brewed here, but the added ingredients disturbed me.

Without wishing to stray too far into the reactionary realm of Bolshevik ideology, I couldn't help but think that shouldn't you try brewing a historic beer "to style" before you start changing it? Otherwise aren't you just making it up as you go along? Which of course you're free to do, but in that case you're not brewing a historic beer at all.  

Is it my scientific ways, wanting to keep variables to a minimum? Or am I just being boring? But obscure beers brewed as they were historically interest me more than innovative offshoots.

Is Craft Beer a Bubble?: The Session #80

I'm making a rare foray into a beer bloggers institution today as today's question is something I've pondered already.

Though in the UK 'Craft Beer' has a slightly contentious connotation I'm simply taking it a meaning microbreweries in this context. 

The huge rise in the number of breweries in recent years has made many people concerned about what the future holds. As pubs close and overall beer sales continue to decline how can the number of breweries keep on rising rapidly? Will the rising wave have to end in a crash?

I don't think so. One thing I learnt when working at a microbrewery was just how small many of them were. Many of them employed only one or two people and in the grand scheme of things the amount of beer they can produce is really a drop in the ocean. This was brought home to me when I saw that Fullers, a reasonably size but not massive brewery, produces as much beer as the 600+ SIBA members combined.  

When I think back to the dark days when most news you heard about breweries was the latest closures there must be a huge amount of capacity lost from shut regional breweries that the rise in micros hasn't come close to equaling.

I'm sure some breweries will close. And rapid growth in brewery number can't go on for ever. But I see no reason for a bubble to burst.

Gone For A Burton by Bob Ricketts

After a surprising amount of difficulty I finally got my hands on a copy of Bob Rickett's memoirs, Gone for a Burton. He spent many years in the brewing industry, starting out at the Brewing Research Foundation before moving to an engineering firm and then going to Bass, where he rose to managing director of the brewing side.

His very personal takes on the work he did, and the people he worked with are given, often very critically. As I was reading this out of interest in learning about history it's problematic that he spends so much time putting the boot in, as this makes him avoid referring to many of the characters and companies mentioned by name. He also misses out a lot of the things I would have liked to have heard about, for example although in 'about the author' it says he was President of the Institute of Brewing there is no mention of this in the rest of the book.

He also regularly disperses the text with 'notes to file' of the lessons he's learnt from the various incidents at work he recounts, which are entertaining enough but many seem no different from the dealing with the dumb decisions I'm sure you could find in any workplace.     

There was enough to keep me interested though. There's an entertaining anecdote involving Cyril Rainbow, a brewing scientist whose Horace Brown lecture I'd recently read, and it's interesting to see the author talk of how surprised people were when canned beer became cheaper than draught beer. Fascinating to see that the boss of Britain's biggest breweries has CAMRA as one of his many targets too, which seems to prove how effective they were.

Ultimately I found the book disappointing as there's more spleen than meat, but there's a few tasty titbits in there.

Beer geek conspiracy exposed!

Despite the risks involved I can now reveal the existence of an international beer geek conspiracy. Even with my long and obsessive interest in beer I first learnt about it only in the last two months.

Having enjoyed reading Sydney Nevile's autobiography when I spied another one by a brewing big cheese I decided to get a copy. "Gone for a Burton" by ex-Bass boss Bob Ricketts was a more recent tome but still written by a man with decades of brewing experience. So a quick visit to abebooks later the order was placed and I was looking forward to learning some more fascinating facts.

But it was not to be. After the confirmation email had come through another one followed, this time with bad news:

"We're sorry! AbeBooks sales order number ******* has been cancelled because the item is unavailable. The item may have just sold to a customer in the bookseller's store or via another website"

That's a stroke of bad luck I thought, but as there were a couple of copies on abebooks I just went back and ordered another one. A confirmation email followed, but again another email came soon after:

 "Unfortunately, as do most sellers we sell on many markets around the world and the software systems can take a few minutes to update, so this means that on a rare occasion, someone may buy the book on another marketplace just before you do and the system hasnt had time to remove it from sale on the remaining markets  before you have also tried to purchase it. This happens rarely, but can happen and is not the sellers fault.

Please accept our sincere apologies  for any inconvenience caused. We genuinely hope that you will shop with us again and look forward to your continued custom."

My luck really wasn't in. Two copies of the same book both bought just when I decide I want it. And that was the last of the copies at abebook. Still, there's plenty more websites in the sea so I went to ebay next and sure enough found a copy there which I bought. Or so I thought.

But once again an unwanted email was soon in my inbox:

"This is a courtesy email from Ebay, regarding your recent order.

I'm afraid that during our quality control checks we found that your book was in very poor condition due to damage occurring whilst in storage at the warehouse. 

Unfortunately we don’t have any more copies of that book in stock at the moment to replace the order with.

Would you be interested in another title as a replacement for this order? Please visit our shop - if there’s anything you would like then please let us know the ISBN and we will have it shipped out within 24 hours from your request.


If there is not any other title you are currently interested in, we will of course issue a full refund should you prefer.

Once again I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but we wanted you to know as soon as possible. If there's anything else we can do for you, please let us know.

Regards, ******* ******  Ebay Customer Service"

This was too much to be a coincidence, two books suddenly sold just when I wanted them, and another copy destroyed in the warehouse. I suspected sinister forces were at work, and when I resorted to googling for the book these suspicious were confirmed:

The book was now going on Amazon.com for over $5000!

A dark conspiracy in the world of beer geekery had connived to corner the market in retired brewery boss books, by buying up what the could and destroying what they couldn't. They were now using their monopoly position to make the prices rocket! Well craft keg doesn't come cheap and they've got to pay for it somehow.

The only flaw in my otherwise watertight conspiracy theory, aside from the lack of any evidence, is that the price is several orders of magnitude more than anyone would pay for the partial views of a retired brewery manager.

Perhaps there are computer programmes that confuse the low availability of small print run minority interest books with massive demand and price accordingly?

Anyway, I waited a month until my twitter timeline filled with stuff about Borefts Beer Festival and with the international beer geek conspiracy suitably distracted was able to pick up a copy for 1p plus postage.

I've read it now so if anyone wants a copy I'm selling it cheap at only $4000.

Bricklayer's Arms Wiltshire Beer Festival

It was back to the Bricklayer's on Saturday for the Wiltshire beer festival. We were staying with the dark side, and though it limited our  selection I don't think we missed out at all as we found some beauties.
 

Unusually for a beer festival there was a drinking convergence amongst us, and thanks to a lucky early strike by the lovely Lisa it was on Plain Ales that we converged. Their porter was on great form so seeing they had a stout on as well it was an obvious next choice. That it was one of the few beers on hand pump was even better as it certainly had better condition than any of the other beers we tried so that was our beer for the rest of the day.

There was a good mix of people at the festival, including some bearded youths. I wondered if these could be the fabled hipsters, but sadly I was unable to differentiate an ironic beard from a normal one so couldn't say for certain. There were drinking cask beer not craft keg though so probably not anyway. We were also definitely in a pub, not a craft beer bar, conclusive proof being that the food was pasties for four quid, not scotch eggs for five.

Which was just as well as the tapas place we normally shuffle off to has been changed into something called 'the toy shop', which is not the sort of place I want to eat at. Eating at the pub meant we didn't have our usual pause to get food so it was time to shuffle on earlier than usual. This lead to us being back home, having a cup of tea, and being in bed by 10. I really am getting old.