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Golden Pints 2011

Monday, December 12th, 2011

This is our contribution to The Golden Pints 2011, run by Beer Reviews and Mark Dredge.

Best UK Draught (Cask or Keg) Beer: Penzance Brewing Company Potion 9 (4%)
From our nearest brewery and, in fact, probably the last brewery in the country. (Everything down here claims to be the last, most southerly or most westerly one in the country.) Best consumed where it is brewed, at the Star Inn in Crowlas.

Best UK Bottled or Canned Beer: Fuller’s Past Masters XX Strong Ale (7.4%)
We liked the idea and liked the beer; and, as we’ve worked through a case, it’s slowly become one of our absolute favourites.

Best Overseas Draught Beer: none
We haven’t had a foreign draft beer which has really blown us away. They often seem a little stale by the time they reach the UK and (boo hoo) we haven’t been to Germany, the Czech Republic or Belgium this year.

Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer: Westmalle Tripel
A new beer from an up-and-coming little brewery you might have heard of…

Best UK Brewery: Thornbridge
When we go into a strange pub and see a Thornbridge pumpclip, we get excited. Variety, consistent quality (at least in our experience) and style.

Pub/Bar of the Year: The Sheffield Tap
A great idea, great premises and great beer, and still going strong after a couple of years. We look forward to a Tap in every city. (Bristol next, please!)

Beer Festival of the Year: CAMRA Kernow, Falmouth
The only one we’ve been to this year. We had a great time.

Supermarket of the Year: Marks and Spencer
Their own range is varied and interesting and the quality keeps improving. Top marks for labelling, too.

Online Retailer of the Year: Beermerchants
We’ve found them reliable, friendly and they have the beer we want (Belgian, mostly) at the right price.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: CAMRA’s quarterly BEER Magazine
Where What’s Brewing is still the preserve of the man-in-blazer photograph and moldy old Keg Buster strip, BEER feels like a 21st century publication with an inclusive attitude and articles from many of our favourite beer writers.

Best Beer Blog or Website: it’s complicated
Any blog we’ve linked to in a post this year is one we like and/or find interesting. If pushed, though… The Beer Nut does make us laugh, and write beer reviews like nobody else.

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Posted in Blogging and writing, opinion | 11 Comments »

Guest post at Fuggled

Thursday, November 24th, 2011

Everyone spotted our guest post at Velky Al’s Fuggled blog the other week, didn’t they?

(What do you mean, no? If you’re not reading Al’s blog, you should be. It’s good.)

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It’s not only beer

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

In this article, amongst many excellent points, Pete Brown suggests that the fuss over the Oxford Companion to Beer highlights a lack of perspective on the part of some beer geeks, bloggers and writers. He says that, sometimes, people’s attitudes make him want to say: “Guys, get a grip – it’s only beer.”

But is it only beer?

We’ve written on a related subject before, pointing out that, as hobbyists, we know it’s just beer, but that taking it seriously is all part of the fun.

Telling real historians and scholars like Martyn Cornell and Ron Pattinson, however, that it’s only beer is like telling an archaeologist that the subject of his study is ‘just a load of muddy rubble’ and that he should stop being so anal about it. Yes, most specialist scholars have lost perspective, and thank God for that.

It’s through the efforts of people who take apparently insignificant things seriously, and spend time doing the kinds of back-breaking research others can’t be bothered with, that we learn more about our world and our history.

Beer is worthy of serious study and we should applaud those who undertake it, however nuts their obsession might sometimes seem to the rest of us.

P.S. We really don’t like wine very much. No pretending here.

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Posted in Beer history, Blogging and writing, opinion | 6 Comments »

Winter edition of CAMRA’s BEER magazine

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

The latest edition of CAMRA’s excellent BEER magazine is available online for members. We’ve got a little piece in it in which we go head to head with The Reluctant Scooper on the subject of smutty pumpclips.

We argue that they’re rubbish.

(There, that’ll save you wading through our whole argument.)

If you’ve read the article and want to argue or agree with us, the comments below are a good place to do it. We’re also on Twitter @boakandbailey.

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Posted in Blogging and writing | 18 Comments »

Update on the Oxford Companion to Beer

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

Since we wrote this somewhat positive but reserved review, there’s been plenty going on.

In a stroke of genius, Alan at A Good Beer Blog has set up a wiki so that readers of the Companion can identify and record errors. What’s particularly helpful, we think, is that he’s asked people to focus on just the facts, ma’am, and not to make it personal. This needn’t be narky, sarky nitpicking — it could be something really constructive and useful.

In fact, hippies that we are, we were hoping this whole discussion would turn into a kind of beer commmunity collaborative love-in.

Unfortunately, what he’s read so far has made Martyn Cornell angry (a bit too angry, maybe). Garrett Oliver, who edited the companion, seems to have taken it personally (it wasn’t, but then the book is his baby) and has responded with sarcasm and a point-by-point rebuttal. And Martyn has come back to that in the comments here. Yeesh. This could run and run.

Meanwhile, all this discussion has been met with cries of “pedantry” and “spoil-sports!” on Twitter and forums.

And we continue to find both bloopers and entries which give us hope. Ron Pattinson might not have much time for Horst Dornbusch, but Herr Dornbusch and Mr Oliver’s article on porter in the Companion cites Ron’s mini-book on the subject and (based on a quick read) gets the basics right. Most importantly, it refers to the story of Ralph Harwood inventing porter as a substitute for three threads as a myth, in no uncertain terms.

We still think the book is a good read as long as you read critically and don’t do anything daft like base an academic paper on its contents; and we certainly still think it’s a big step forward in terms of ambition for books about beer.

But our view has hardened a bit: it’s not pedantry, nitpicking or spoil-sport behaviour to expect a book which costs quite a lot of money to get the history right. Yes, maybe some of those pointing out errors could be a bit more gracious and take less obvious glee in finding them but, really, no-one should publish a book with some claim to academic rigour and be surprised when academics and historians challenge it. It’s all in the game.

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Posted in Beer history, Blogging and writing, opinion | 18 Comments »

Oxford Companion: Good, not Perfect

Sunday, October 16th, 2011

Detail of text from the Oxford Companion to Beer

We like The Oxford Companion to Beer (ed. Garrett Oliver) a lot more than we were expecting to and, although far from perfect, it certainly beats any other catch-all on the market.

So, let’s get the big flaws out of the way. First, entries differ wildly in tone of voice and occasionally contradict each other. Wikipedians would describe some as “not encylopedic in tone”. But then, each entry is attributed, and this is pointedly not an encylopedia with a capital E — it’s a ‘Companion’, suggesting something less formal.

Secondly, every tenth entry is written through the weird prism of American home brewing culture, with phrases like “true to style” and “German ale” occuring in pieces which stridently expound very shaky history, citing less than credible sources. But then critical readers (like wot we are) will spot these entries a mile off and take them with a pinch of salt. They don’t ruin the whole book.

Finally, on the subject of sources, there are too few primary sources cited, and many instances where one contributor cites another contributor’s book as the source for an entry. Cliquey-ness? Laziness? Primary sources inspire a great deal of confidence in a reader and any serious attempt at history should use them.

Having said all of that, those flaws and a few others do not mean there isn’t a great deal to enjoy.

The more technical entries covering contemporary brewing practices, hop and barley varieties and chemical processes are fascinating and (to us at least) seem well sourced and credible. Every time we pick it up, we learn something new, and feel inspired to read more elsewhere.

A few years ago, when we wanted to buy a friend a primer on beer, the best we could find was the Eyewitness Guide edited by the late Michael Jackson. Although the Oxford Companion is expensive, it is now the best book to buy anyone wanting to get a good overview — or at least to begin to appreciate the complexity and depth — of the world of beer.

If nothing else, it will hopefully spur others on to produce similar, bigger, better books. With apologies to those who have worked hard writing them, we don’t need any more variations on 750 Beers to Try Before You Need Your Stomach Pumped, where pornographic pictures of beer are accompanied by tasting notes.

Note: we got a free review copy from Oxford University Press.

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Posted in Blogging and writing, opinion | 16 Comments »

Eight alternatives to ‘boring’

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

Pint of ordinary bitter in an English pub.

1. Well-mannered, polite
Ron Pattinson prefers polite beers to arrogant ones. Is a polite beer one which, although it doesn’t seem the life of the party, perhaps impresses you over time with its integrity and good qualities?

2. Bland
Nowadays, bland is a pejorative term absolutely synonymous with boring, but it hasn’t always been. Somerset cheese used to be advertised as bland and digestible; a woman in the nineteenth century might have been described as bland if she was pretty. It derives from a latin word meaning soft or smooth.

3. Vanilla
There’s bad vanilla ice-cream — bright yellow, basically whipped margarine, with artificial flavourings — and there’s the good stuff, where a flavour we take for granted is made once again the star of the show. Is that beer boring or does it make a virtue of good old English hops, instead of easier-to-spot varieties?

4. Standard
Almost every British brewery makes a standard brown bitter, which conforms to punters’ expectation of this type of beer, being within a certain range of colour and strength. Not brewing a standard bitter would be commercial suicide in many cases: these beers are the foundations on which breweries are built.

5. Straightforward
Yes, you can buy a pair of jeans with green stitching and butterflies embroidered on the knees, but maybe you just want a pair of bloody trousers. By the same token, aren’t all these bells and whistles on big beers a little pretentious? Don’t you sometimes just want a beer which quenches your thirst, bites at the back of your throat, and knocks the edges off a bad day? Does every beer have to be profound and eye-opening?

6. Clean
Precision engineered lagers are sometimes put together with the intention of making the experience of drinking them only slightly removed from that of drinking sparkling water. Let’s not sneer: these beers can be refreshing, and they’re technically marvellous.

7. Classical
Having regard to established principles of form and composition in the pursuit of harmony and balance, rather than seeking to innovate. Disciplined and respectful of tradition.

8. Subtle
After two pints, you start to notice flavours which are hard to pin down, and even harder to describe. This beer makes you work for your tasting notes and doesn’t pander to your lazy, hop-shocked palate. Perhaps you’re not up to it? Perhaps you need something brasher and simpler?

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Posted in Blogging and writing | 24 Comments »

Things you should read

Friday, August 26th, 2011

The internet and the blogoshire has been afire with good beer writing in the last week or two. Here are some bits we’ve especially enjoyed.

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More posts dreckly

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

This is just by way of a quick update on what’s going on with us and the blog.

First, the blog’s not dead. If you stick a thermometer in its liver temperature to estimate time of death, it will sit bolt upright and scare the living crap out of you. (Tsk. Bailey will insist on watching CSI — Boak.)

We’re unlikely to ever get back to posting as frequently as we were doing in, say, 2008, but there should be more signs of life now we’re settled in down here in Cornwall.

Secondly, having named a ‘beer of the week’ more or less every week for a year and half, we’re going to retire that little feature. The fact is, in Cornwall, the beer of the week most weeks would probably have to be St Austell Tribute.

Finally, below, you’ll see our last couple of ‘leaving London’ posts. We hope you enjoy them. We certainly enjoyed the experiences that inspired them.

PS. Here’s a quick explanation of ‘dreckly’, our new favourite word.

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Posted in Blogging and writing | 3 Comments »

Brewer’s blogs

Monday, November 15th, 2010

A good number of brewers are now blogging properly — that is, writing the material themselves, being quite open and generally engaging with their punters. We love it.

We’ve kept an eye on the Thornbridge blog for a while, but are ashamed to say we’ve only just clocked Stuart Howe’s blog, even though it’s been going for yonks; and now there’s Kelham Island’s Brew Girl too.

Now we’d like brewers’ blogs from Dark Star (tantalising glimpses), Crouch Vale, Meantime… it’s easier to set up a blog than a website so they’ve got no excuse!

Posted in Blogging and writing, breweries | 3 Comments »

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