UPDATE Ha! As I wrote yesterday, researchers in yeast genetics are changing the story on the history of yeast all the time, and the day I put that post up, new findings on the genetics of lager yeast came out which, as New Scientist reported, take the hybridisation narrative further down the road to a… Read More The history of yeast: breaking news
Around 80 million years ago, when Triceratops still browsed the plains of what wasn’t yet North America, some flowering plant species developed a new strategy to spread their seeds, encasing them in a soft, fleshy cover – fruit – that became sweet and tasty as everything ripened. The fruit was then eaten by animals, which… Read More A short history of yeast
Olympic – which really ought to be renamed Icarus Airlines, since as a company it looks very likely to follow soon the trajectory of the doomed early Greek aeronaut – is manned by incompetent twazzocks. They reschedule flights which then arrive so late they take off at the originally scheduled time anyway. They cancel flights… Read More How to find decent beer in Greece
The Great British Beer Festival isn’t about the beer. Well, OK, a large part of it is about the beer, there are hundreds of different brews on sale. How could it not be about the beer. But for me the beer isn’t the main pleasure: instead it’s the chance to meet a large number of… Read More GBBF: not all about the beer
If you enter the words “beer sales UK” into Google News right now you might feel in need of a strong ale or six, with headlines saying: “Beer sales slump to Great Depression levels” and “Decline in sales of beer in the UK accelerating”. (Actually, that last headline really reads: “Decline in sales of bee… Read More Cask ale sales: gloom or boom?
Thanks to Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote a poem about it, and Bruce Williams, who started brewing it commercially 15 years ago, heather ale is now firmly associated with Scotland. But in fact the Irish have just as great a claim to be the home of heather ale, with good evidence that it was brewed… Read More Heather ale: Scots or Irish?
If you’re 20 and planning a big party for your 21st, or you’re 20, soon to be married, and arranging a jolly wedding reception, and in addition you live in London, you should buy all the drink you’ll be needing for your guests now, because Boris Johnson, the new Mayor of London, and a rising… Read More Bonkers Boris backs barmy booze-buying ban
At the top of the (long) street where we now live is what used to be a pub called the Lord Nelson, the middle one of a trio of boozers with Napoleonic names between Hampton Hill and Twickenham Green. (The other two being the now-closed Wellington and the Prince Blücher, which is named after the… Read More Loch Fyne could be finer with decent beer
The excuse given for Wikipedia is that its articles may not be the best, but they provide a good leaping-off point for finding out more. That’s not true of the Wikipedia entry on India Pale Ale, however, which is so completely, uselessly wrong as to be actively dangerous: the mistakes in it are going to… Read More IPA: Incredibly Poor Article
It’s been a year since I started beer blogging, and the big lesson I have learnt is this: a majority of the population thinks Kirstie Allsopp’s surname has only got one ‘p’ in it. One of the coolest wrinkles available from good blogging software is the ability to see what words people have put into… Read More Lessons from blogging 1: most people can’t spell Allsopp
