One of the particularly interesting facts to emerge from the papers prepared for last week’s BGBW seminar on wood-aged beers was that Greene King has been giving everyone, including our leading beer writers entirely the wrong tale about the name of BPA, the beer that is blended with two-year-old 5X to make Strong Suffolk. The… Read More Come-back for the Burtons
There’s an odd feeling, like you’re doing something slightly illegal, when drinking and discussion beers that would have been poured down the drain by every generation of brewers before this one for being irredeemably faulty. But 21st century brewmasters have discovered the flavour found in wood, and declared it good. Unlike wine-makers, especially many white… Read More The woodbegoods
When I worked on a local newspaper in one of Hertfordshire’s duller towns in the mid-1970s, the news editor rushed in from the pub one lunchtime frothing with excitement – he had just been given a story by a guy in the bar that was bound to make the week’s front page splash. This man’s… Read More Pernicious myths and a ban on hops
Co-incidence time again – I went to the Rake by Borough Market last night with Patto, who was over from Amsterdam, without knowing that it had just won the best bar award in Time Out‘s Eating and Drinking Awards. It’s not the smallest pub I’ve ever been in but it’s certainly smaller than my living… Read More Rake’s Prowess
I was born, in what Carl Jung would have insisted was no coincidence, on the site of an old pub, the Upper Flask in Hampstead, near the Heath. The pub closed in the second half of the 18th century, and the building that housed it was replaced in the early years of the 20th by… Read More The potboy in history, literature and art
Corrected June 20 2008 to adjust for more accurate information – see this post. The economic values displayed on eBay sometimes bemuse me. Last October a copy of the first, 1974, edition of the Good Beer Guide went after frenzied bidding from what I assume were completists wanting to own a full set of GBGs,… Read More A three-threads thread
Plugging different beer-related key words into the search facility in the Times newspaper archive 1785-1985 is continuing to turn up gold. In June 1843 a series of small ads began to appear in the newspaper for Bavarian Pale Stout – put that one in your BJCP guidelines – brewed, not in Munich, but by Beamish… Read More Pale Stout
Beer is a popular subject, and has attracted an army of commentators down the centuries. But over time a mountain of misunderstanding, myth, fiction and fantasy has been put into print by writers on the drink’s history, all of which continues to be repeated today by the lazy. Some of these errors, like the easily… Read More FAQ – False Ale Quotes
The Times newspaper in London has recently completed the magnificent task of digitising its entire run of issues back to 1785, meaning every word, including all the advertisements, is now electronically searchable. This is a tremendous boon to historians, who will be greatly helped in finding the answers to many of the vexed historical questions… Read More Inside the pale
I’ve been going to beer festivals for 30 years, I’ve served behind the bar at them, I’ve organised them, and I’m still not sure I really like them. The problem is that whatever time you go, it’s always Friday night – that is, the bars are packed, it takes ages to get served, often the… Read More Restive about festivals