A pub crawl in Hackney

The unfortunately plague situation made Continuing Professional Development difficult. So once lockdown eased I got in touch with the editor of the Journal of the Brewery History Society to organise a research trip. 

I set off to London early and was delighted to see people on the train drinking cider at 10am, it made my midday start seem positively restrained. 

I was heading up early so I could see an astonishing piece of artwork, The Silent Agitator by Ruth Ewan: 

An old illustration by Ralph Chaplin (who also wrote Solidarity Forever) has been turned into a large working clock.

The IWW has been growing again in recent years, including at British breweries, which lets face it is needed. So as the man said, time to organise, join the IWW. 

There was a slight hitch with the start of the main event as our first stop was shut. Though Hackney's part of a large city it seems this isn't enough to stop people having conjugal relations with close relatives when they should be opening pubs. 

So it was on to a tap room called The Experiment where I think for the first time this year I suckled from the devil's drainpipe.

The clear moral certainty I had in my youth is no longer there, as though the beer came from a keg I couldn't say for sure if it was evil or CAMRA kosher. 

I said an act of contrition and three Hail Protzes just to play it safe. Our next planned stop was also shut, once again showing the surprising popularity of inbreeding in Hackney. So it was on to the Hackney Church brewpub. Once more it was keg only. Thank Bakunin craft keg isn't a threat to cask beer. 

Flash looking kit but very modest brew length. 

As well as their own stuff they were also serving Kernel beers so we passed up our chance of brewpub beers. 

We next called in at the Brew Club tap room where I couldn't see anyone brewing or in fact any other punters. Still they had Bohem lager on keg which I was keen to try. 

Brewed by Czechs using Czech methods was this OK due to their heathen foreign brewing traditions? Or as it's brewed in Britain was it evil? As a man of simple faith I find such theological questions troubling. The beer was fine, but apparently is better when served from a proper Czech tap. 

There were no such problems at the Hackney Tap, as they had beer served as god intended.

One for the retro-fontologists

Only two beers on handpump mind, but as one of them was Landlord one would have been enough.

Lovely, lovely Landlord

Our next stop was The Pembury Tavern for Five Points beer. We had a couple here then ...

... it was, er, somewhere else. I think it was back to The Cock Tavern but all this research was fatiguing me as I was tired and emotional by this point. 

Anyway, we had at least another one in here. Well most of another one as I managed to knock my glass over. Definitely time to go home. 

How to breed new barley varieties

Finally, years after learning how new hop varieties are bred I learnt about barley breeding and how the seeds breed true. I don't think I've been as happy to hear anything since I learnt the invisible etchings of Salvador Dali were safe. 

With hops each new seed is a unique individual and so in effect a new variety, established hop varieties essentially being clones made by taking cuttings from a single female plant. Barley though is clearly grown from seed so how does that work? Read on and see:

Various methods can be used for developing new varieties of plants:

• Cross breeding
• Hybridisation
• Mutation
• Genetic Modification

We were told that breeding is easy, but the punch line is that making new varieties might be easy but making new varieties better than the old ones is a lot more difficult. 

The registration system is important because unless your variety can get official approval (Agiculture and Horticulture Development Board and Malting Barley Committee) it is unlikely to go far. 

Plants are selected for a number of criteria, but particularly harvest yield. 

Non-GN (glycosidic nitrile) is important for malts used in distilling because of concerns it can produced the carcinogenic ethyl carbamate during distillation.

Barley plants have male and female parts. The first stage of making a cross is to cut the male parts off a plant to prevent it self pollinating. 

Then pollen is taken from the other plant involved in the cross and used to fertilise the first one. 

As Confucius says, in breeding filial generations of offspring are numbered F1, F2, F3 for first, second and third generations, etc. 

Each cross will make 500-1000 sibling seeds, with the same parents but different combinations of genes, 

These will be crossed again, giving move diverse gene combinations but also fixing diversity by inbreeding to get homozygous plants which will breed true due to having the same alleles for each gene.

The best plants will be chose to proceed with for further breding trials.

Seeds will be sent to New Zealand to speed up the process, rather than waiting another year to plant. 

By this stage only plants breeding true will be moved forward in the trials.

One quick test if the plant will be a good variety is if it makes 25g of seeds. Laboratory and genetic tests will also be used to look for desired traits in the plant. 

Larger scale trails will be carried out:

100kg of seed will be obtained from these. From these further tests, including micromalting will be carried out. 

The breeding and selection of new barley varieties is in many ways similar to how new hop varieties are made, except for the self pollinated inbreeding to get homozygous plants that will breed true from seed. Tissue culture can also be used instead of self pollination as haploid pollen can be used to make homozygous diploid plants. 

Where's the wild beer?

Something that crops up occasionally is people mistakenly claiming beer can be made by adding cereal grains to water. The latest example of this was from an article on psychedelic pints, which may perhaps explain some of the outlandish claims made:

It is of course nonsense you can make beer by throwing grains into water. So maltsters and brewers can rest easy in their beds! You might perhaps get the grain to germinate, so at one point it will in effect be green malt, but even mixing green malt with water won't give you beer. You might be able to get a mouldy mess, but I shudder to think what state the water would have to be in to make this safer to drink. 

It has occurred to me that if some sort of primitive beer is this easy to make then why don't we see it naturally forming on a regular basis? If ancients could make beer by simply getting wild grains they'd picked wet then surely now grains are farmed on an industrial scale shouldn't it be happening all the time? When barley fields are flattened after heavy storms shouldn't there be reports of beer puddles forming? Or if a grain silo or lorry has a leaky roof shouldn't spontaneous outbreaks of brewing happen? Come to think of it if it was that bleedin' easy why don't teenagers desperate to get hold of some alcohol mix wholemeal flour and water a few days before parties?

Making alcoholic drinks from sugary fruit is relatively simply, and I have seen reports of animals getting drunk on rotting fruit so perhaps naturally created 'wild' wine does exist. Turning starchy grains into something alcoholic is far more complicated though (that whole malting and brewing process) and it is human ingenuity and our dedication to getting off our heads that we have to thank for beer. 

Where is the craft?

Whilst listening to Pete Brown talk about his book Craft: An Argument the term craft did, briefly, make sense. But his non-defined definition and the need for it have slipped from my mind and for the life of me I just can't see it any more. 

In America, where it all started as a reaction to the bland products produced by multi-national brewers, the definition of craft brewery has been changed and changed again until about all that's left is "not more than 25% owned by a multi-national brewery". I believe the largest craft brewery in the States now sells more cider and alcopops than their rather dull flagship lager. 

As to actual craft beers many of them sound more like alcopops now anyway, and certainly some craft brewers have embraced exogenous enzymes, bollocks ingredients including actual bollocks, and genetically modified yeasts (something multi-national brewers have never dared use). I'm not going to make any moral judgement but I can't see where the craft is. 

The standard bearers of craft beer in Britain have always been Brewdog and it's been obvious for years that they're tossers. Recently their ten year plan was revealed and they're going to focus on producing lager because they want to be bigger than Heineken. Can anyone tell me how becoming a giant lager selling multi-national is craft?

Their response to revelations about their awful toxic work culture has been straight out of the corporate playbook. A woman has been made chair of the board. Hurrah! A woman who happens to be boss of a venture capitalist firm, because nothing says craft like having a venture capitalist in charge. And to go with it there's the usual HR guff that I hope will have their employees stampeding to join the IWW. 

I've long thought that Orwell would have a few words to say about Brewdog:

 “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” 

But seems Nietzsche would too: 

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster."

I can't recall William Morris promoting a toxic growth obsessed work culture though. Craft: it's all bollocks really, isn't it?

Nature is healing

Blimey, it was a close run thing this year. Mild is not easy to find in the South East at the best of times, and this is certainly not the best of times. Spending a week in the Scottish Highlands didn't help either. But as I was up in London today I thought a detour to Borough on the way home might work, and after some confusion behind the bar, success!

A pint of mild was mine, my spiritual obligations were fulfilled and my immortal soul was safe. Nature is healing. 

Great beers theory and the Glass Struggle

 Over at Beervana Jeff Alworth has been posting a series of articles on classic beers. This inevitably comes across as more Great Beer theory of history rather than say, the history of all hitherto existing beer is the history of glass struggles. The most recent post, on Jaipur, is also about the most recent beer in the series, which means it's history I've lived through. So I get to go "hang on a minute, that's not how it happened":

Jeff is right that there was a buzz around Jaipur. I can remember a brewer I worked with 13 years ago (who has since gone on to win the Champion Beer of Britain, though with a vanilla stout) raving about it. But despite my best efforts I hardly ever saw it on cask, and still don't today. It may be because I live in the South East of England or it may be because, as is pointed out, it's at the strong end of what's usually seen on cask. It's hard to sell 72 pints of something at 5.9% ABV in three days as people won't be knocking back pints of it all night. Well, not if they plan on doing anything the next day. Jaipur was also certainly not "like nothing the Brits had tasted". We had tasted American hops before.

Which brings me to a cask beer I think was more influential in popularising their taste and has been around longer: Darkstar Hophead. At 3.8% ABV it more suited to cask and I've seen it a lot more often. The lower strength also makes it much more of an American/British hybrid than is claimed for Jaipur, rather tenuously I think, because the malt comes from Maris Otter barley. 

It should also be mentioned that thanks to the late, great, Glenn Payne bottles of grapefruit flavoured American craft beer had been available in a national supermarket chain long before Jaipur came around. 

Then when we get to "Craft Keg and CAMRA's Folly" a narrative is promoted that makes a good story but doesn't fit the facts. CAMRA did not react to the arrival of American-style keg beer as if it was Watney's Red Barrel 2.0. What they in fact did was nothing. That the Campaign for Real Ale also functions as the de facto campaign for good beer meant this caused a lot of frustration for many beer geeks. Eventually it lead to CAMRA's long and lumbering revitalisation process, and CAMRA making their peace with (key) keg beer. 

American-style kegged beer arriving did not cause breweries to open for the first time in decades, the microbrewery boom in Britain started at the same time as it did in America (in fact I think Britain has a valid claim to have started it first). The biggest factor in the rate of brewery growth increasing further was in a tax change with the introduction of Small Brewers Duty Relief. 

I also can't remember anyone ever arguing that "the new craft wasn’t properly British". That it wasn't real ale certainly, but not that it wasn't British. We're told that "Bitters had been the standard pub beer for half a century and hadn’t evolved an inch. The fidelity offered by CAMRA had become a straightjacket" which again is trying to fit a narrative rather than reporting facts. I can remember the rise of Golden Ales, which was a major change to the appearance and taste of beer commonly seen on cask. The reactionary, dogmatic traditionalists of CAMRA reacted to it by...adding a Golden Ale category to their competitions and several times crowning Golden Ales as Champion Beer of Britain, the World's most prestigious brewing award. 

I suspect things read on social media inform the article to a great extent, and though it was common at one point for British crafties to claim CAMRA is only interested in traditional session bitters, something echoed by in the post, this is not and never has been true. Craft beer certainly has expanded greatly the range of beers that you're easily able to find in Britain, but before then CAMRA beer festivals were the best places to find unusual and strong beers on draught. So an ABV of 5.5% is not "quite a bit stronger than English beer". It is stronger than most, but certainly not all English, or even British beers. In fact another post in the series is on Fuller's ESB, which after its strength was reduced slightly is... 5.5% ABV.

That cask ale brewers have taken to using modern American hop varieties seems to me to be part of the continual evolution that saw the growth of hoppy golden ales. I'm sure Jaipur helped push this but to say that in such beers "we see the DNA of Jaipur" is over egging it. The influence of American craft beer has certainly lead to a big increase in the range of beers brewed in Britain but cask beer has always evolved and I'm sure it will continue to do so. 

 

Faith Of Our Fathers

Since the dark forces have been beaten back enough that pubs have reopened I have of course been going down my local. That Satan and his minions are still able to impose ludicrous restrictions lessens the experience but it is still a valid sacrament. Those of your still only drinking out of tinnies in your living room should be aware that the special dispensation allowing such behaviour has now expired so unless you honour the sabbath by getting down the pub at the weekend you are sinning!

Yes, I know it's bleedin' cold and table service is surely an abomination unto the lord, but god, it's good to be back. Though I'm no theologian I can speak infallibly when I say that pubs are the high point of British culture. Admittedly there's not much competition, but still, they're great, even you have to sit outside and for some stupid reason get waited on. 

Being back down the pub and drinking beer served as god intended nourishes the soul in ways that drinking at home cannot, even if we have to suffer a little at the moment. And lets face it pubs have had a very hard time and need the custom. Get back there.