Well, I’m compiling them on Sunday, anyway.^† Unless you live in a very-tardy timezone or wait a while, I guess you’re not actually reading them on one. It’s been a couple of rather overwhelming weeks here at Beer Diary HQ; busy, distracting, exhausting and gradually restoring — all in ways both good and bad and bit-of-both-actually. Wellington itself has been all over the place, too, so I haven’t felt alone. The above was a few days ago; fog so thick you nearly forgot the City existed just there and sights around the harbour were awesomely transformed as everything took on more of an Edge Of The World feel. Today, conversely, was another do-some-gardening and jump-off-a-pier day.¹

George and I will be back shortly with the season-finale Year In Review episode of the podcast — now’s the time to send in memory-jogging / two-cents-having suggestions for your Beer Of The Year and Glass Of Beer Of The Year,² plus any general feedback you might have on format, distribution, and all that. There could well be a beer in it for you. Meanwhile, though, there’s this:

• The Bottleneck Awards 2013: Speaking of years-in-review, I’m pretty sure this is my favourite. Dylan’s got a wonderful knack for pointed rambling, and y’all should be reading him regularly.
• That’s a paddlin’: A charming account of a (minor) part of gearing-up to homebrew. Which I still haven’t gotten myself around to, somehow. Jase’s previous project — the Beer Money blog — was a great ride, and his latest seems to be coming along nicely.
• Beer & Gender in baby steps: There’s been a little soul-searching (and back-seat soul-searching) about CAMRA lately, and I thought this was a nice sketch of some super-simple little things that the organisation could do to help the cause of equality. And, generally, if you can help, you should.³ And there are ways every person, business, organisation — or thing — can help. And sexism in the beer industry can get fucking grim and sad. So let’s all help, please.
• Guests of BrewDog: Three dispatches appeared this weekend — from Martyn Cornell (him of the indispensable myth-busting beer history), Adrian Tierney-Jones, and Peter Alexander (a.k.a. Tandleman; someone who often curmudges a little hard even for me — see, e.g., his objections on the above beer-and-gender piece) — after a writers’ trip to BrewDog HQ and environs. They’re all worth reading, but I can’t help but be a little sad at how credulous they all are. Admittedly, I’m (now) firmly skeptical of those self-styled “punks”, but those pieces all soft-pedal the authors’ prior concerns (most hiding them in hyperlinks, rather than acknowledging them more directly) and come with shamefully piss-weak disclaimers⁴ that the trip — a significant value in travel, accommodation, goodies and access — was all on BrewDog’s dime.
• Kippers, etc.: Speaking of BrewDog, you’d do well to also (or instead) spend your minutes with Luke and Dave’s Ale Of A Time podcast. The most-recent episode, among other delights, spends a good while on ‘Hello, My Name is Vladimir’, one of those marketing stunt beers the BrewDogs are so fond of, which — in Luke’s estimation, and with which I completely agree — just horribly misses the mark.
• On conflicts of interest, kind of: Local theatredude Uther Dean⁵ on the many weirdnesses of “criticism” and review, the tension (but inevitability) of having people who both create and critique,⁶ and the elation and despair that producers subject themselves to when they read responses to the work. It’s not even vaguely about beer, but it could so-easily be.
• Diversity of response: The latest round of The Session mandated non-traditional “reviews” (i.e., not reviews) of beer, and there’ll be gems for all tastes among the roundup (which came in two parts) — on which I’m only really just getting started. I didn’t manage to participate, but it’s probably obvious that I’m not hugely fond of traditional beer reviews — the kind that end in stars, numbers, or bottlecaps…
• Catch One-point-eight Million: This is why brand loyalty sucks. They — by which we presently mean “Tui” (i.e., D.B., i.e., Heineken), but it extrapolates out perfectly — foster it in you at your expense for their sake. It would’ve been perfectly possible to run the ‘Catch a Million’ promotion at-or-close-to cost, and it’d have been just as brand-building and just as fun. But no, they can’t help extract wodges of extra cash from their “fans” on the way, showing a cynical and weirdly hateful fundamental approach. [Late-breaking update, a few hours later: see the comment below for the additional relevant fact that you could apparently get a t-shirt for free, which alters the math substantially. I’ll have to re-visit this particular case, but brand loyalty is generally still bad for you.]
• Cellaring, accidental or otherwise: The Beerhive’s other half here offers so thoughts on cellaring beer — with my dodgy memory, I’m particularly blessed in the “forget about it” department, which has led to some amazing aged beers deep in my Stash. You can see that Kieran⁷ recommends ‘Bigfoot’, tempering the “don’t age hoppy beers” conventional wisdom with the reality that these things just change — it’s up to you and the sensory subjectivity of your own brain whether that’s a good thing. (But as a tangential side-note, can we please end the practice of Googling for vaguely-related images and just slapping them in an online piece without attribution? See @PicPedant on the Twittermachine, for one person’s heroic struggle towards that worthy end.)
• And finally, an irrelevancy: Because I’m a big believer in the primacy of handwritten originals, and a massive natural selection nerd — though equally much a Wallace fan as a Darwin one.

†: Well, that’s when I started. Let’s ignore that it’s “now” Monday evening; time is an illusion, self-imposed deadlines triply so. (To borrow again from Douglas, and to merge and mangle his quotes.) ↑
1: By which I mean it was, for the most part, sunny and warm. Which is just different from rainy and grey, not “better”. I’m all for diversity and subjectivity, after all, and am only lately myself really starting to ‘get’ summer, and find a way to fit myself properly into it. ↑
2: That might seem an obtuse doubling-up, but it’s a distinction that’s served us well for the last two years, and we’re (probably) sticking to it. Meanwhile, recording our Year In Review in March was never the explicit plan, but it seems now to be cemented as Tradition. And I like it; too many Best Of Last Years seem blatted out to meet deadlines. Nuts to them, and to that. ↑
3: See, e.g., Spiderman. ↑
4: I don’t quite know which is worse; one is all-too-subtle and just inline of the main text, the other two are at the end (past a good number of readers’ scroll-bothering, I’m sure), and dropped down significantly in font size — one even vaguely slagging off the mere idea of a disclosure. I’m sorry (n.b.: not actually sorry), but disclosures are utterly fucking mandatory, and need to be front and centre — and not just of the text, I’d argue; they’d do well to remain in the tone. It’s not difficult. ↑
5: Who directed an utterly fuckin’ excellent adaptation of The Trial, just by the by. ↑
6: Though I’m often thinking of the potential conflicts and always trying to navigate them, I do hasten to point out that I’m no “creator” (of beer), despite working in a brewery — I’m a functionary, not a decision-maker; a bureaucrat rather than a stakeholder. But I do make words and whinge about words, so his points nonetheless resonate — and, if you ask me, some of our best sources of words-about-beer do also brew the stuff. ↑
7: Friend of the show and no fan of the summer months, which nicely brings me back to fn1. ↑

They treated the rest of that day as though it was a Sunday, that is to say what you should expect of a Sunday. You need time for big and complicated new concepts to shake themselves down in your brain slowly, without damaging what is already there.

— Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth

I’ve got a few longer-form and more-detailed ponderings on the go at the moment — a catch-up on All Things Moa in the year-and-some since their infamous IPO, and an attempt to build a bulwark against some of the more-annoying and more-absurd bits of the recent Moral Panic around beer (too-often standing in for “booze in general”) and the reflex to restrict its availability. But it’s a Sunday, and they never feel like the occasion for such heavy-lifting — except perhaps in the garden — so I’ve instead happily been going through my pile of Interesting Miscellaneous Things To Read.

Back when I was a paperboy, we relished January as a month of lighter-than-usual deliveries thanks to the end of holiday advertising a the general Slow News Month. In the beer world, at least, it seems there’s no such effect:

• Beer & Biodiversity: A wonderful little explanation of the parallels between not-usually-related complex fields. If you’re vaguely interested in one, it’ll help with the other; if, like me, you’re a big geek about both, it’s just gorgeous. Bonus marks for anyone who has noticed me banging on about “rich ecosystems” — of beers, of bars, and of festivals — of late. You are hereby forewarned that I intend to do it even more.
• Bellamy’s and Parliament’s parties: It turns out that the very first thing the New Zealand Parliament legislated on was its own access to alcohol.
• Brewers who blog: Welcome back Greig Mcgill (of Brewaucracy) and Luke Nicholas (of Epic), both evidently resolved to return to the semi-regular-beer-writing fold for 2014. It’s possible that Contract Brewing is necessary for anyone have time for Consistent Blogging.
• An overly-honest beer ad: In the fine tradition of slightly-unnerving satire.
• Stone & Wood’s blog: I’ve mentioned my newfound gardening hobby / habit a few times before, and I must say that’s it’s been making me seriously crave their Garden Ale for extra beer-and-occasion matching. Their blog is a consistently enjoyable read, whether they’re rambling about the aforementioned deliciousness, making an excellent case for more-civilised drinking,¹ or apologising for being too damn popular.²
• The extra value in “local”: (If any.) I’ve always enjoyed the inevitable slip into hypocrisy of anyone who, in their early days, heavily relies on geography in their “pitch” only to later realise they’d like to export and, you know, make some real money. Tuatara have swapped the “Brewed Locally” which once topped their labels for “Hand Crafted”, and Hamilton’s Good George is currently in an amusing Billboard Spat with Lion over ownership of the L word which makes you wonder if they’ll never make liars of themselves (if regularly sending beer to Wellington doesn’t already count).
• New American Trappists: With the opening of the surprisingly-mundanely-named Spencer brewery, it seems my Dance Card is no longer complete — although, actually, I also haven’t had any Mont des Cats or Engelszell. (And somewhat fittingly, they had help in setting up from the above-mentioned Pretty Things brewery.)
• Mandatory Pete Brown: 1) On “craft beer”, an excellent musical analogy,³ and how honesty and quality are important. 2) Conclusions from his previously-here-referenced Dry January. And 3) on the excellent value-for-money-ness of beer. (But generally, just read Pete Brown.)
• The Beer Pilgrim: This seems to be Lion-in-Australia’s version of whatever it was that moved them to that ‘Made To Match’ horribleness (albeit way better executed); an insufficiently-openly-branded parade of naff that will probably make you dumber by the minute. Another tragically wasted opportunity and failure of corporate courage.
• And finally, an irrelevancy: Because the space program is fucking amazing. We are particularly strange monkeys, sitting on the shoreline sharpening sticks and bashing rocks in very specific ways so we can build rockets to wander the universe in and robots to go out ahead of us. (See also: an informative geek-out about orbits, and Kerbal Space Program — which taught me that lesson the hard way.)

1: Speaking of which, as I mentioned the other day when writing up my own (at the time accidental) manifesto on the same, I also hugely recommend Matt Kirkegaard’s recent radio ramble on that point (while pimping a Brisbane beer festival). His recent ‘Tao Of Beer’ musing is also absolutely worth a look — and interestingly also clipped the same Hipsters Love Beer video that The Wireless illustrated my piece with; it seems that satire also struck a chord, or even a nerve (as it should). ↑
2: Something that my day job also just succumbed to. ↑
3: Which reminds me: welcome to the fold, Buzz and Hum — a very promising new blog on one man’s love of good beer and good music. Exactly what I was in the mood for after the Jono Galuszka podcast. ↑