I’ve been meaning to re-read Alice Galletly’s marvellous ‘Beer For A Year’ for ages. Despite best intentions, my own output is still at a low ebb — you should see the brimming Drafts folder I have on here1 — which often prompts me to go back through things I’ve enjoyed reading and which spurred me to write more. I bring up certain B.F.A.Y. posts regularly as I hack away at something vaguely related — but it’s high time I enjoyed it properly again: chronologically and cover to cover.
And in one of those marvellous coincidences that my brain seems enduringly capable of creating — where procrastination leads to eventually-excellent timing — I started re-reading Alice’s first post with my coffee this morning: bang on its three year anniversary.
So in lieu of umpteen neglected Sunday Readings, I gift to you 365(+) posts of excellent ramblings; wherein an ‘outsider’ with a wonderfully unpretentious enthusiasm undertakes a Herculean task, repeatedly doubts her wisdom for doing so before [SPOILER ALERT] ultimate triumph, instantly falls into an excellent system of hypothetical-relationship-based beer taxonomy, and myriad other delights. I’m less than a quarter of my way through the re-read, but loving it all over again already — it’s well suited to binge-reading, with that same joy in overdose and thematic overload you get from wallowing in a whole season of a favourite TV show.
1: I mean you actually should. As in, I’m trying to finish them off and get them publishable, I really am. You’ll have to excuse some fairly dated references in the mix. But I suppose that’s always been my thing, in a way. It turns out even self-imposed deadlines make that delightful wooshing sound. ↑
And when you gaze long into the fog, the fog gazes also into you. (Or something like that.)
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 twoparts) — 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
Pretty Things ‘Jack d’Or’ — on a Sunday, just not this particular Sunday
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.
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.)
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.
So. It’s not quite Sunday, and these posts don’t even remotely form any kind of pattern in time. Such is life, I suppose. Productivity goes all over the place when you get a) really busy, then b) a complete break from being busy at all. Drifting slowly closer to Normality once again — strictly in the timetable-statistics sense, mind you — I’m inclined to have another go at beneficial-habit-forming.1 And besides, just as your holidays are not everyone’s holidays,2 your Day Of Rest — and thereby your catch-up-on-reading-stuff time — isn’t necessarily a Sunday according to the calendar. (Apparently, University mostly taught me how to rationalise missed deadlines.)3
Anyway, I was privileged enough to have a decent-length summer holiday in which I caught up on a metric butt-tonne of (non-beer-related) reading. And so now, in the interests both of spreading the love and of assisting in everyone’s valuable procrastination, here follows an eclectic collection of (beer-related) Things To Read I’ve stumbled upon recently. Enjoy!
Beer money: Stu McKinlay — Yeastie Boy and friend of the show — recently wrote a wonderful piece for the local paper’s beer blog, breaking down the cost of his products. It’s a nice antidote to the all-too-frequent whinge about the price of a pint when beer is actually the most ludicrously value-for-money luxury consumption good I can think of. Stu and I agree completely about that,4 and his before-the-beer-goes-in breakdown of costs is a large part of his rejoinder to my complaints of origin-fudging in labelling.5 (He’s also bang on with his own recommended reading / inspiration at the end, there.)
BrewDog burglary: Despite the above-mentioned affordability of beer, it seems we’ve “matured” (which almost certainly isn’t the right word) where apparent thefts-to-order of particular bottles are now occurring. Naturally, I’m obligated to wonder if they perhaps orchestrated the heist themselves, just for the headlines. Given other antics, you couldn’t really put it past them, any more… The perils of stunt marketing, I suppose.
The Sub: The website for Heineken(etc.)’s in-fridge keg system, similar to Lion’s ‘Tap King’ which recently debuted in Australia. It’ll be interesting to see how these things pan out in the wild, but for now just look at the wank with which it’s presented. Yeesh. And for next, let’s wonder about whether some cleverness and some 3D-printed parts might make them universalisable for dispensing flagons of better beer… (Thanks, of a sort, to Luke — who has recently joined the Podcasters’ Guild — for the link.)
Proper history:Brewery History, the journal of the (UK) Brewery History Society, operates a neat model whereby the full text of issues becomes freely available once the content hits its second birthday. The most-recent to be so revealed is their special edition dedicated to the life and work of Michael Jackson (you know, the other one), and it looks like a cracker. I’m ordering a printed copy, after just scratching the surface of the text online. (Massive thanks to Kieran for the pointer.)
Probably somewhat revisionist history:The McCashin’s Story is out, and I’m yet to grab / find / borrow a copy for a proper read — but colour me skeptical. The surtitle is transparent nonsense, whatever your personal definition of “craft”, and the smell of myth-making is strong — compounded by the (very gentle) interview Terry McCashin had on Radio New Zealand. Theirs is only a “David & Goliath” story if David later entered into an, er, money-for-physical-company arrangement with the giant. So to speak. They talk up an “#8 wire mentality” after buying an existing brewery, they deride beers ‘notable only for what they lacked’ while peddling Reinheitsgebotty nonsense, and credit themselves with giving Lion its first “lager with legs” presumably never having stumbled upon Steinlager. (That said, I did enjoy two of their ‘Recognition Series’ beers while writing this up — and re-watching Harry Potter.)6
Local reportage: A perfectly nice write-up — of my de facto new ‘local’ and its environs — by profoundly hit-and-miss critic David Burton, which slips into oddness when it insists that the area has a nickname it’s never had.7 Best anyone can tell, it was suggested once, in sarcastic jest, on Twitter, and hasn’t ever been used earnestly. A timely reminder that you should always be wary, when reading reviews from abroad: too many writers just can’t help themselves from making up little details to make them seem down with the kids. There’s a need for a general raising of the collective eyebrow given the quality of some stuff out there, and I’ve been meaning to get into that for a while — he says, casting a sideways glance his copies of the industry rag DrinksBiz.
Dry January, defended: I couldn’t be more on Pete Brown’s side on this, even though I don’t share in his yearly ritual (or anything like it). I’ve struck my own balance with the chemical realities of beer and the many ways it’s involved in my life — and no longer working nights in a bar and becoming a daily commuter cyclist have definitely helped — and do think it’s important that everyone find their own way to do the same, and to keep checking in with themselves whether its working. Just don’t dismiss people who do things differently; they each might find different balances and particular patterns that work. In extremis, they might give it up entirely. And on that, read this incredibly brave piece by Jackson Wood and — as always — don’t be a dick.
And finally, an irrelevancy. Because you really should consider re-watching and/or re-reading Harry — not just because Neville Longbottom is super bad-ass.
Holiday reading
Golding’s disappoints
Stoke ‘Double Pale Ale’
1: As much of our civilisation attempts to do, each January. I’m always torn between wanting to join in the hoots of derision for the cycles of failure that most New Year’s Resolutions orbit within, and having to admit that it is indeed an excellent time of year for clean-outs and rearrangements both external and internal. ↑ 2: As a long-serving hospitality worker, I really hope everyone does remember to keep this in mind, each year. But you, dear readers, are Civilised Folk and treat service staff properly at all times, right? Excellent. ↑ 3: Lines from the much-mourned Douglas keep coming to mind, lately: “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” and “I love deadlines. I like the wooshing sound they make as they fly by.” ↑ 4: And rambled about it together in a piece recorded recently for Radio New Zealand, which will hopefully find its way to air (and online) soon. ↑ 5: Which we didn’t get to on the podcast, but will have to revisit properly one day. ↑ 6: Your Mileage May Vary, as always, but particularly so here because a) I’m genetically near-immune to the diacetyl fault, and b) Em described the Double Pale Ale — which, as Fritz & Maria rightly point out in the above link, is entirely wrongly named — as “nicely buttery”. ↑ 7: It also nicely proved the need for Stu’s Beer Money piece, when the first comment it attracted was a whinge about $10 beers. ↑
I’ve been on a run of six-point-something-day work weeks, lately; some self-inflicted, some externally imposed. Still not a word of complaint, though — but equally few hacked out to put up here. And so a public holiday to the rescue, delivering a three-day weekend by way of a Day Of Rest in commemoration of a nice idea that’s forever been tricky to actually apply. With some a couple of alarm-free mornings,1just the right amount of domestic productivity, and a lovely little beer festival, it was a cracker of a super-sized weekend and today has a very suitable Sunday feeling to it.
Which, naturally, puts me in mind of the ‘tradition’ I keep trying to make more traditional. And so, with all the best intentions to do this — as well as everything else — more often, I present for your perusal2 a few choice tidbits:3
A history of Canberra brewing. I have a real soft spot for Australia’s deeply-odd little capital — I lived there for a while and had truly formative Beer Geek Moments at the marvellous Wig & Pen — and was delighted to find an apparently-exhaustive history of the beer business in town. Visit the Wig while it lasts, and immediately check out whatever Richard Watkins gets up to next.
A sobering longer-view look at the history of American IPA — and of beer in general, while they’re at it. I’m not sure I entirely agree, but I’m much more there than not; we’ve been doing this for a long time, as a species, and it does sometimes pay to do a little internal check-sum on whether you’re losing proper sense of scale in time and place.
This lauded (and recently revised) chart, which has (if you ask me) almost jumped the shark into an unreadable mess with its looping glassware-suggestion arcs and the largely-useless-for-non-Americans brand tokens for each type. Paging Ed Tufte. (But full marks for the lower-left’s Spaghetti Junction which consigns a few deserving candidates to being drunk from the can, 40oz, or Solo Cup.)
The (bloody-marvellous) Gruen Planet team talked beer, for the first major section of last week’s show. Interesting to see things from a marketer’s perspective; even though they’re not dogmatically pro-“craft”, they’re still anti-crap — whether the crap in question is outright lies, or just boringness. (They’ve also reminded me that I really, really want to hack the Tap King into a general-purpose flagon-dispensing gadget.)
TrackYourBud.com,5 where you can learn — to use the word quite wrongly — that rice is an extravagantly expensive ingredient that other breweries don’t love you enough to us (and definitely not a cost-cutting blandifier), that “ageing” a beer can be measured in mere days (not silly old-fashioned months or years), and that Budweiser can still apparently say (with a straight face and without being fined and/or sued into oblivion) that “no other beer takes as long to make”.
And finally, an irrelevancy, because it’s nice to be reminded that the “new” things — be they comic books, videogames, digital art, or whatever — aren’t necessarily just vaguely-modified and somehow-weaker instances of “real” culture; they can be totally and amazingly themselves.
1:Sleeps-in, as I like to call them, ever the fan of a French-style front-loaded plural. On Saturday, my first un-buzz-assisted waking-up in weeks, I actually managed to have a surpassingly suitable song lodged in my brain the second I was conscious. ↑ 2: In either the original sense of “to read with careful attention” or the more-modern usage of “to skim, hoping to vaguely extract the gist”; language evolves in wonderful, liberating and contradictory ways. ↑ 3: Which admittedly do require a more expansive, cultural-studies-esque definition of “reading”, since two of them are videos, one is a (dis?)infographic, and one an interactive webmonstrosity. ↑ 4: Or rather, given the mechanics of the Placebo Effect, they might be mostly exactly what you think they are. Thanks to Amy for the link — both times. ↑ 5: Thanks, if that’s the right word, to Hadyn for the link. ↑
Little Creatures IPA, and its older Pale Ale sibling
My recent little trip to Sydney was a marvellously-restoring one, but also did a fine job of further-breaking my already-fragile relationship with the “working week” as traditionally understood, in the process dealing another knock to my ongoing efforts to habituate myself into my Sunday Reading project. The holiday also coincidentally contained a changing of the Beer Diary guard, with the second notebook filling up and finally giving way to its waiting successor — the first entry for which was the rather-suitable and rather-lovely new Little Creatures IPA pictured right there. Given that this site was originally born in the transition from Diary I to Diary II, I’ve prodded myself into a little housekeeping and tinkering since I got home: I’ve freshened up the ‘About’ pages, properly enabled the email subscription system, and (probably most usefully) finally found and activated the mobile-friendly version for those of you reading on your cleverphones. If there’s anything else that needs adjusting, in ease-of-use terms and whatnot, let me know.
Meanwhile, in the course of said tinkering, I noticed that I’ve missed my own ‘birthday’, of sorts. The first post here — a surprisingly brief Hello world referencing a peculiar and now-abandoned post-dating scheme — was on 26 September 2010, so apparently I’ve been at this for three years. Lawks. Given the superawesomeness of the weekend’s shinding, and the zine which helped kick off my still-limping-along Reading ‘tradition’, I should have more to say on the subject of beery birthdays soon, but for now there’s all this:
An ode to the interrobang. I was pleased to see my beloved little punctuation mark get a bit of press recently. It’s been my little icon here, on the Twitters, and elsewhere from the start, and is definitely worth knowing. That it was born in the Mad Men-esque Golden Age of Madison Avenue is all the more appropriate, given how often what the fuck‽-esque outbursts are occasioned by the sad Don Draper wannabes at Moa.
Graphing the rise of “craft beer”; literally, as a phrase. I’m always interested in the evolution of language in a given field, and even though it’s North-American-centric, it’s a great little initial exploration of the increased traceability of words in the modern, heavily-gadgeted age. Martyn Cornell first blew my mind with the idea that “beer style” — as a notion, a phrase, as the go-to way for organising the industry — is younger than I am, and entirely the invention of one man. (One legendary chap, but still.)
The perpetuation of nonsense, despite the existence of myth-busting history (speaking, again, of Martyn Cornell). It’s sad to see that the rapidly-revising “new history” of beer isn’t being more-readily assimilated. I guess there’s always a lot of inertia to push against: taxonomy is hard, history is hard, and language is always evolving — see especially, there, the confusion that results if you don’t know that “stale” didn’t always carry negative connotations.
The Cask Report, which also necessitates a third link in a row to Martyn Cornell. It’s almost all good news in there, but the insight into the tension between publicans and drinkers when it comes to just how frequently a beer lineup would ideally change is worth some further pondering; sometimes I do wonder if switching products every keg turnover really is desirable…
Pretentious Beer Glasses, for if you need to one-up your friends and colleagues who are busy fawning over that trendy Spiegelau IPA thing. George sent me a link to the P.B.G.C. hoping for a rant, but I think they’re awesome; sufficiently self-aware, genuinely clever, and apparently well-made. (As for the Spiegelaus, I finally caved and got a pair for myself and am slowly coming to the conclusion that they are both pretty cool and pretty silly, much like Tuatara’s new reptilian bottle.)
A pondering on intent and “craft”, which — with “philosophy” and “craft beer” right there in the title — seems to be right in my wheelhouse; I’ll have to track down the article itself. I suspect that something like this is the only hope for a “definition”, though it’s always an open question whether we need or want one of those, anyway. (But you can forever rely on philosophers to try and build you a good one, just in case.)
Meanwhile, on the other BeerDiary, they’re gearing up for Season 2. Greg Zeschuk used to make videogames — that have accounted for hundreds of very enjoyable hours of my life — and now he makes very well-produced Beer TV; a thing we need more of, please. And on the other-other Beer Diary, Chris Hall wrote a love letter to the Cantillion brewery, as much as it visibly pained him to give anything unvarnished praise. Both Diarists are obviously kindred spirits of mine.
And finally, an irrelevancy, since a birthday is as good a time as any to remind yourself to think positively about the future, and since you should always pay attention to whatever Neal Stephenson is pondering at a given moment.
Brewaucracy ‘In Triplicate’ — mere minutes ago, in fact
It’s a vaguely productive but incredibly restoring weekend, here. I’ve been going through the dimmer recesses of my fridge and finally pulling out things like Brewaucracy’s ‘In Triplicate’ — pictured, at right, not too long ago and still going as I write this —and belatedly realised that last weekend was so (oddly) productive that I neglected my Sunday Reading completely. As a tradition, we’re off to a shaky start indeed — but postponements of various kinds and durations are par for the course, around here; if anything, that is the meta-level tradition.
George and I — and a plus-one who didn’t really count as a guest in the usual sense — sat down for a podcast recording session yesterday, and I’ve got my Matariki and Beervana debriefs in draft form; more-regular transmission stands a good chance of soon resuming. Meanwhile, there’s still plenty going on to catch up with:
The Froth-Blower’s Manual, by Pat Lawlor1. Em found me this for my relatively-recent birthday, and it’s an enduring source of flip-through-it entertainment. It’s positively a relic, published in the sixties though with content that apparently mostly dates from closer to a century ago, but is properly charming despite its incredibly-dubious reliability. Neil Miller’s raved about it a few times before, and it seems relatively easy to find in libraries and second-hand bookstores.
Heineken’s effort to target the over-60s, as reported on The BeerCast, with assistance from the author’s admirably-crotchety dad. It turns out that Heineken run a kind of crowd-sourcing ‘Ideas Brewery’, which feels like a fairly stark and sad admission that they don’t really know what they’re doing. The insight into their processes is hugely telling; the blunt reaction of a relatively random real person is damning.
Moa’s Disingenuous Shitfight #1: Cloudy Bay. Hitting a few stumbling blocks with the consenting process for their — necessary, if their business plan has any hope in Hell — expansion, Moa are in a slagging match with one of their neighbours. A nearby winery has objected to their proposal and Moa responded with a press release wherein “Moa CEO Geoff Ross says the brewer is considering housing its new facility in a ‘winery’ to appease the French” — knowing full well that it’s not the size of the facility that counts, it’s the level of use; wineries are (largely) once-a-year hives of activity whereas breweries can be productive (and thereby noisy, etc.) every single day. Given how often Moa wank on about their founder’s winemaking experience, I think you’d be excused for expecting them to know that…
Moa’s Disingenuous Shitfight #2: Tui / DB / APB / Heineken. Meanwhile, a Tui billboard appeared, satirising Moa’s recently-tanked share price, and Josh Scott (through a rather-obvious ghost writer) hit back with one of their wordy full-pagers which managed to entirely undermine what could’ve actually been a good dig about the labyrinthine ownership of the Mega-Congloms — if they hadn’t just said that it should be “all about the beer”. If ownership’s fair game (and it is), then share price is fair game. Moa really are levelling-up their Hypocrisy, these days; “foreign ownership” is a big element of Shitfight #1, too — but it’s a bit rich given that Geoff Ross made a chunk of his brewery-buy-in money by cashing a cheque from a bunch of Cubans. The take-home lesson from both Shitfights, if you ask me, is that there can always be more than one bad guy in any given conflict; there’s not necessarily a hero, there’s often just two equally-obnoxious losers taking drunken, uncoordinated swipes at each other.
And finally, an irrelevancy, because I’m an enormous fan of The Simpsons and was already feeling relatively philosophical about its legacy since I just last night farewelled my beloved — if anything, even moreso — Futurama. Again.
And with that, it’s time for the last (delicious) sip of this ‘In Triplicate’. Cheers!
1: Not that that biography mentions TFBM, shamefully. Meanwhile, the other readily-Googleable “Pat Lawlor” is responsible for the stupidly-awesome Twilight Zone pinball table. It’s an auspicious name. ↑
Moon Dog ‘Black Lung III’, one of many Birthday Treats
Attempt to start a new weekly tradition, miss your self-imposed deadline for just its second incarnation. That does sound a lot like a ‘me’ thing to do. But in my defence, it was my birthday. Well, my birthday weekend — I took liberties with the calendar when the realities of work broke my usual Take The Day Off commandment; fair’s fair. It was a marvellous weekend, though: beginning in earnest on the Thursday with the Michael Jackson Memorial beer tasting at Regional, shambling through a few nice pubs on Friday night, baking (or at least vaguely helping-to-bake) a Coopers-Stout-fortified chocolate cake on Saturday, watching some fantastic roller derby with a belly full of (good!) beer I’d daringly drunk from a can while biking along the waterfront to get there, then mooching at Hashigo with my ears full of superawesome jazz drumming, braving Sunday morning for the sake of the markets, babysitting a mercifully-quiet brewery shop before kicking some serious arse at trivia with friends (and nachos and beer).
But enough gloating — and, seriously, may all your birthdays be similarly Your Kind Of Thing — it’s (past) time to share my recommended reads for your downtime — on whatever day it falls this week.
Anythingby Michael Jackson. Obvious, but mandatory. I shamefully realised that I don’t actually have my own copy of any of his seminal beer books, despite years of using his Malt Whisky Companion as a reference (I was a whisky nerd before I was a beer one). I’ll soon remedy that. During Thursday’s tasting, Geoff read great passages from MJ’s work, and showed clips from the recent Beer Hunter movie, which all reinforced what a terrific chap he was and how much he helped shape and document the beer business. He’s a member of my own internal pantheon of Authors Gone Too Soon —together with Douglas Adams and Iain (±M.) Banks.
A (vague) summary of the ‘Brothers Banks’. In charmingly rambling and kind-of beer-clouded Gonzo style, Dylan takes a stab at answering the question that popped into 95% of brains at the Brewers Guild awards: who won the Morton Coutts trophy?
The Thirsty Boys on why they haiku. Mostly I’m just happy that they do, so ably documenting the Beer Geek Church that is Hashigo on a Tuesday — which has sadly become less a part of my own weekly routine. I do confess to hoping that the post itself would be in haiku, though, big fan of recursion that I am.
Beer Cycling in Belgium, an envy-inducing post-holiday ramble from Luke which (especially after more than a few Belgian beers in the MJ Memorial tasting) has me determined to start a specific Holiday Fund.
Martyn Cornell in reportage mode (rather than in his mythbusting historian hat) on the emerging Two Cultures of (UK) beer festivals, something that’s been on my mind since Matariki / Beervana. Though, while I’m a big fan of (mass) observation, what I really want is data; I must try and get some real sampling going.
The Wonderbrewer of Nowheresville, a really nice long-form piece on the brewer from Hill Farmstead, the ludicrously high-scoring Vermont brewery which can’t help but put you in mind of the Emperor’s New Clothes effect and superdeadkeen to try their beers for yourself. Massive thanks to aimee whitcroft for the link, because the rest of the week’s articles — and the ‘magazine’ in general — looks like it’s got plenty of other goodies to be going along with.
And finally, an irrelevancy, because the world needs more good books just like it needs more good beers — and you can judge a person by how they consume both.
A day of rest sounds like a fine idea, as the peak of the local beer-business-craziness begins at last to recede — and even though my Sunday has been relatively productive so far, it’s certainly been restfully so. My general timetable still hasn’t settled down so much that I’m getting a lot of Rambling Time, but my Reading Time is mercifully intact and I wanted to start sharing a little of it more widely — since there are metric bucketloads of good stuff out there worth casting your own eyeballs over.
My intention is to do this kind of thing regularly, making little bookmarks as trawl the internets with my morning coffee during the week. I’m sure I’ll miss out plenty of gems this time, my memory being what it is, but here’s plenty to get started with:
Yeastie Boys’ birthday zine, Big Mouth: A lovely surprise in the Hashigo Magazine Rack was the above-pictured little masterpiece, produced to celebrate five years of operation for Sam & Stu. Em’s been reading it on the porch as I assemble this post, and blurbed it simply as “positively cool”. It’s got ramblings, disturbingly hilarious imagery, oddball humour — and even occasional mentions of, you know, beer. I’m not sure if they will or have already put it online, or whether it’ll remain an old-school dead-tree production, but it’s worth seeking out for sure.
Let There Be Beer: Melissa Cole dissects a tragically shallow and bland promotion, which reminds me all too much of Lion’s local ‘Made To Match’ attempt. Despite a wealth of potential awesomeness in the “beer and food” field, these fail entirely. Sad.
Beervana debriefs: I’m grotesquely overdue to write up my own — it’s here on my computer, in draft form, and was originally even a Beervana Preview, before ingloriously falling off my bike like a complete gumby on my way to the Brewer’s Guild Awards thwarted my plans of posting that — but the task has been ably handled, in images and text and video, by Jed Soane, Tim Herbert & Jono Galuszka, and Paul Wicksteed respectively — and that’s just for starters.
The (Full) Session: James has returned from his Little Country travels, during which I had the fortune to meet him (lovely chap), and posted his round-up of ‘Elevator Pitch’ rambles — of which there are a lot, and I’m very much enjoying going through them slowly, adding most of the authors to my forever-expanding Feedly (if they weren’t there already). A whole mass of short pieces is a great way to survey the scene and see what a diverse mob of awesomely opinionated weirdos we all are.
A little post-awards profile of Martin Townshend, whose beers I seem to habitually (and deservedly) recommend on the podcast, which is worth it just for the photo that makes him look like a mischievous little imp, hardly bigger than a bucket.
Moa’s annual meeting results: As much as a non-zero-axis graph irritates me every damn time, I’ll admit to being transfixed by the movement of Moa’s share price. Michael Donaldson, last week, wrote a great little piece about their recent and ongoing woes, and it’s been the subject of plenty of pondering which I’ll (mostly) leave alone for now. It’s interesting that their publicly-traded status opens a window into usually-private meetings; the notes from their recent annual meeting are online and worth a read to see how the (at best) terminally deluded talk amongst themselves. Personally, my favourite bit is this, from Geoff Ross:
To start, I would like to re state the Moa Vision — ‘To Become New Zealand’s beer brand, globally’.1 Given New Zealand’s growing beverage credentials worldwide, given that every country has a beer brand attached to it — Mexico Corona, Australia Fosters, Italy Peroni etc. We believe we have the brand story, the exportability via our shelf life, and provenance and identity to be this brand for New Zealand.
Craft Beer continues to be in growth worldwide. And whilst there are more entrants, there will only be a small number of participants that have the capability — skills, capital, and experience — to become a business of scale and global in nature. We believe Moa has what it takes to be one of these brands.
I put it to you that anyone who doesn’t mind the contradictions in that pitch (and how akwardly it sits beside boasts of being a “super-premium” beverage)2 either doesn’t know what the fuck they are talking about — or is speaking to a room full of people who don’t know what the fuck they are talking about and is attempting to extort as much money as possible from them before they figure it out.
1: Not that I should have to be the one to point this out to them, but the “vision” in the original IPO document was to create “New Zealand’s beer, globally” — letting that troublesome word brand slip in before the comma is perhaps a revealingly significant difference, and down that road lies sublime ridiculousness. ↑ 2: In case you need help: clear-bottle-and-a-citrus-wedge Corona is the poster child for “it’s just too damn hot, I’ll have a vaguely-beer-flavoured sparkling water, thanks”; Fosters is popular internationally as mass-market swill, reduced to the kind of shallow commodity that just gets brewed under license close to wherever its sold, and so laughable in its home market that even its parent company wanks on about “Crown Lager” instead; and Peroni’s just, well, an incredibly boring example of the same. Those were Ross’ three examples? How incredibly out of touch is he? ↑
