Beer Diary Podcast s05e05: Crowd, Fun, Ding

Damn these recurrent hiatuses. It happened again, as these things do. But we’re back this week — rather fittingly, after the long weekend — with a little look at crowdfunding in the beer business, some reminiscences over my marvellous trip to the Mussel Inn, and looking forward to the Great Kiwi Beer Festival this very weekend, at which I’ll be doing one of my little rambles. All that by way of bicycle bells and videogames, and accompanied by two rather strikingly different Beers Of The Week.

There are several sadly-long-neglected episodes in our proverbial back pocket, which I’ll upload over the coming weeks. You — our listeners and our excellent guests — have our apologies, and also our welcome back.

As always, a direct download of this episode is available, should that better-suit your listening habits. We’re on iTunes and there’s also a podcast-specific RSS feed you can follow through whatever app or gadget you listen to these things with. For handy reference, you can direct people to podcast.beerdiary.nz, and you should feel free to contact us — via this very page, the podcast’s Twitter account, or on Facebook — with any feedback, corrections, suggestions, or whatnot. Cheers!

Mussel Inn tap bank, plus miscellany
Beautiful clutter
Crafters & Co.'s ill-fated PledgeMe equity drive
Rightfully doomed
(Most of) the lineup from 'Will It Shandy?' with The Bottleneck's Dylan Jauslin
Shandidates

Continue reading Beer Diary Podcast s05e05: Crowd, Fun, Ding

Will It Shandy..?

At Golding’s, where I work with1 Dylan of The Bottleneck blog, it’s not uncommon to see us indulging in a little game we call ‘Will It Shandy?’ when we’re trying out new arrivals to the taps. A shandy — that’s a beer mixed with lemonade, on the remote chance the word is unfamiliar to you — is a much-maligned thing, and this upsets us both greatly. They can be truly wonderful, in a few different ways and for a few different reasons. So, starting with the Platonic Ideal of the modern shandy — a simple pale lager and a mass-market lemonade — we sat down to try a few different types of beer and see what twists and nuances we could find; to investigate not just whether we thought something could shandy,2 but also to start to test the why. In the name of both Science and Silliness, we recorded our endeavours and you can listen to the result above — or indeed over at Dylan’s. Very many thanks to him for doing all the editing work, and to The Coconut Monkeyrocket for our theme music.3

Continue reading Will It Shandy..?