All posts by Phil

Mediawatch

Sunday Reading

2 Comments
Yeastie Boys' Big Mouth Zine
Yeastie Boys’ ‘Big Mouth’ Zine

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? ↑

Rambles and rants, The Session

The Session #78 — The elevator pitch: Be Your Damn Self

3 Comments

The Session logoPreamble for beginners:1 The Session is a long-running monthly collaborative blog-thing wherein diverse people muse over a certain predetermined topic. Despite reading a possibly-unhealthy amount of beer-related writings,2 I’ve never joined in before, but was moved to do so when invited / challenged by James Davidson (of Beer Bar Band), to make a pithy (i.e., short) ‘elevator pitch’ for better beer.

The four word version of my answer came to me immediately, but I’m entitled to a somewhat-roomier 250, so I might as well use them. I’m looking forward to seeing what else people come up with today, but for what it’s worth, here’s me:

Be Your Damn Self

It all comes down to that.3 And it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the elevator talking to a consumer, producer, commentator, or — let’s face it — yourself.

Drink what you like, how you like.4 Be open to new things, but an informed and tested preference is unimpeachable — and you should assert it. Don’t be cowed by fashion or peer pressure or the tragic one-way-street of ‘brand loyalty’. Sensory experiences occur privately in the brain; cherish that, and leave others to their weird decisions while you enjoy yours.

Brew what you like, how you like. If you’re worrying about what “leading breweries” are doing, you aren’t one and likely won’t become one. Doing anything well will steadily stoke demand for exactly that thing. Don’t mislead your customers about who you are or how you operate — there’s nothing inherently wrong with any particular scale or business model, but there’s a lot wrong with bullshit.

Say what you believe, with your own slant. Objectivity’s basically unattainable, and little fun anyway. Be up front about your biases, nail your colours, and speak truth — whether brutal, rhapsodic, ramblingly personal, or partisan. Every unique and genuine voice is valuable signal in the ongoing conversation. Inauthenticity is noise pollution.

Know thyself, as our friend5 Socrates (probably) said. A little more honesty — internally and externally — will get us a long way.

1: Including myself.  ↑
2: Seriously, you should see my Feedly. Which is, by the way, proving very handy since the demise of Google Reader. Actually, you probably should see my Feedly. I must do a round-up for Beerpeople I Like To Read, one day. There’s buckets of good stuff out there.  ↑
3: In just 1.6% of the allocated time!  ↑
4: Just be moderate — in moderation.a  ↑
— a: Which apparently isn’t Oscar Wilde — and he’s also wrongly cited for the “Be yourself, everyone else is taken” which could nicely sum up my (unusually brief) ramble, here. (Though he does have a somewhat-similar “Most people are other people” in De Profundis, apparently.)  ↑
5: He’s in the Bruces’ Philosophers Song twice; surely he counts as a friend.  ↑

Podcast episodes

Beer Diary Podcast s03e03: Beer Names (and Festivals, again), with Hadyn Green

6 Comments

Catching up for the first time in a while, and not long after a now-notorious kerfuffle over the ‘Death From Above’ beer put out by Garage Project (site of my day job, if you haven’t already noticed), my friend and fellow red-bearded beer writer Hadyn Green and I were about to have a ramble about potentially-offensive beer names when George leapt in and suggested / insisted we save it for a podcast. And here, perhaps obviously, is the result. The conversation looped around the place — frequently bouncing back to the “beer names” theme, with detours for recent and upcoming festivals among other more-random topics (and no shortage of videogames).

Continue reading Beer Diary Podcast s03e03: Beer Names (and Festivals, again), with Hadyn Green →

Rambles and rants

BrewDog, ‘Boundary Road’, and becoming the villain

29 Comments
'Boundary Road' / Independent / Asahi's BrewDog flyer
‘Boundary Road’ / Independent / Asahi’s BrewDog sales flyer, with bonus superfluous apostrophe

Here’s an interesting angle on the “faux-craft” clusterfuck that has besieged the local beer business: BrewDog, plucky young Scottish upstarts equally loved and loathed for their antics and attitude, have finally signed up an official New Zealand distributor — and it’s ‘Boundary Road’. That is to say, it’s the grotesquely-misnamed Independent Liquor, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Asahi, operating under the guise of their contrived and not-really-existent “brewery… nestle[d] in the foothills of the Hunua ranges”. As a conglomerate, B.R.B. / I.L. / Asahi are peddlers of all kinds of bullshit and nonsense, and really know how to put the f-word in “faux-craft”, so to speak.

Independent work the fakery at both ends and very fond of the “origin-fudging” I tipped as the unfortunate theme of 2012. With Boundary Road, they’ve set up a Potemkin1 craft brewery which they pretend isn’t the hugely industrial facility that also manufactures three-litre casks of vodka RTDs and which pumps out licensed knock-offs of green bottle Continental lagers that try very hard indeed to look imported. Leveraging the mega-bucks of the alco-pop business,2 they seem keen to take up a seat alongside our existing local beer duopoly, and to carve out a greater slice of the market. Already armed with big, mainstream international brands — both counterfeit and genuinely imported — they recently embarked on a campaign to shore up some “craft” cred. It began in earnest with their ‘Resident’ project, which brought in (with some wankery and double-dealing) an American brewer whose image still adorns several beers,3 continued with their distribution of the Sam Adams / Boston Beer Company range from the U.S., and now — or at least very soon, judging by the Beervana exhibitors list— includes distributing BrewDog. The effort to co-opt some goodwill by associating with those brands is transparent in the way they’re labelled as imported by “Boundary Road” while they avoid using that name on their decidedly low-brow volume-game products like Ranfurly.4

BrewDog 'Punk' IPA tap badge
BrewDog ‘Punk’ IPA tap badge

BrewDog are expanding at an impressively dizzying pace, but signing up with Boundary Road / Independent / Asahi is complete nonsense and makes a mockery of all the occasions on which they’ve (rightly!) been invoked5 as aggressive and elaborate marketers who remain genuine rather than resorting to peddling offensive and insufferable brandwank. There’s tremendous worldwide demand for their stuff — including here on the other side of the world, and including by me. Some of my favourite beer-related moments have been BrewDog ones, one way or another, and I’d love to have them more readily-available around here. But seriously, guys, there are (approximately) eleventy-bajillion companies involved in the import-export of booze and most of them aren’t producers of exactly the kind of industrialised garbage you specifically rail against. It’s no surprise that a company like Independent will happily clip the ticket, take their markup, enjoy some collateral credibility, and not particularly mind being ridiculed by a member of “their portfolio” — but it’s fucking depressing that the “punks” at BrewDog would go into business with alco-pop-peddling bullshit-artists like these.

BrewDog's 'Revolution'
BrewDog’s ‘The Revolution’ — featuring Boundary Road’s apparently-beloved Carlsberg third in line

Because I really do mean “specifically rail against”, above: Carlsberg is one of Independent’s flagship faux-imports,6 and also regularly appears alongside Stella and Becks in BrewDog’s marketing material, being obliterated with golf clubs or sent to the gallows. They even once had a memorable campaign — BeerLeaks.org, now retired, but cached in the Wayback Machine — which quite-rightly decried the origin-fudging practices of brand-first companies and called out Carlsberg by name. With its maximally-deceptive combination of subsidiary, parent, and licensors, Independent is exactly the kind of “faceless cartoon monstrosity” with a “destiny dictated by accountants” that was supposed to be first against the wall. With the aforementioned eleventy-bajillion alternatives, I just can’t believe BrewDog couldn’t find anyone better to deal with7 — and, really, if you can’t find a distributor worth doing business with in a given territory, don’t do business there; craft beer drinkers, the impassioned people you’re supposedly brewing for, will understand. Likewise, there’s a horrible irony in the joyful way BrewDog have been joining in the healthy skepticism about the U.K.’s new ‘Let There Be Beer’ campaign while shipping beer to those very-same “fakes and phonies”. Hypocrisy’s an interesting sin, one that’s basically immune to evasion and retreats to relativism,8 and one which undermines BrewDog’s authenticity. This isn’t ‘Equity for Punks’ anymore; it’s descending into Equity for Avril Lavigne.

That said — and even while keeping a few well-worth-reading cautious words about their partial-public-ownership model very firmly in mind — I’d still rather have a slice of BrewDog than of, say, Moa. The apparently spineless hypocrisy of the former doesn’t remotely rise to the level of the latter’s misogyny and clueless backwardness — which earned them an enduring personal boycott (not that they’ll ever care). But, much like my reaction to Emerson’s after the Lion buy-out, if this rubbish deal stands, I’ll just be less excited about BrewDog than I used to be. Handing my money over to their habitually-bullshitting distributor will happen less readily, and feel a little bit gross. Getting in bed with ‘Boundary Road’ takes the shine off the Scots and sits there as another depressing little data point that “success” always involves selling out at some point — which I sure as hell hope isn’t the case. Martin, James — BrewDogs, of all levels — I implore you;9 be the freakin’ Batman again, don’t be Harvey goddamn-Two-Face Dent.

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

— The Dark Knight

1: Matt Kirkegaard and I are resolved to use this term more often. It comes from the maybe-never-actual (but-still-perfectly-symbolic) façades apparently thrown together to once fool a visiting Empress. I first used it for the way D.B. kept the corpse of Monteith’s around to pretend they still brewed on the West Coast (a practice they’ve actually since resumed, but for a long time the place was mothballed), but it fits these foundationless “brewery brands” so perfectly as well. This kind of shallow origin-fudging for the purpose of creating illusory scale and/or origin and/or character is — if you ask me — “faux craft” in its purest form. ↑
2: During serial abuse of the meaning of the word “independent”, they note that they’re #1 in RTDs and that their “key brands” are “Woodstock, Cody’s, [and] Vodka Cruiser”. ↑
3: Meanwhile, that whole production was a year ago, now. Has anyone seen them advertising for a new “resident”, or are they going to keep producing Spike’s beers in perpetuity? And if so, does he know that? I’d love to see the contract he worked under… ↑
4: Itself a very long-standing piece of origin-fudging, I suppose, given that the town the beer is named after almost couldn’t be further from where it’s brewed. ↑
5: Including quite-frequently by me. They were, if I recall correctly — always a big “if” — my go-to example for non-aggravating beer marketing in our podcast thereon. ↑
6: Along with preposterous claims to “Uncompromising Quality” and “Exclusive Aromatic Hops”, Boundary Road’s version of the Carlsberg carton bears a quote from Jacob Jacobsen, the brewery’s founder: “In working the brewery it should be a constant purpose, regardless of immediate gain, to develop the art of making beer to the greatest possible degree of perfection so that this brewery as well as its products may ever stand out as a model and, through their example, assist in keeping beer brewing in this country at a high and honourable level”. I submit that, given the context in which his beer now finds itself, if you attached magnets to his corpse and wrapped his coffin in copper coil, he’d be spinning in his grave so hard he could power the whole of Denmark. ↑
7: For completeness’ sake, I suppose there is an outside chance that BrewDog don’t actually know the nature of Boundary Road / Independent. But the companies register and the Googlemachine aren’t exactly rocket wizardry, and so this alternative (if anything) makes me even further depressed. Meanwhile, I once worked for a bar — the Malthouse here in Wellington — which imported a whole bunch of BrewDog itself, way back in 2009, without a need for a distributor at all, and one of the aforementioned “favourite beer moments” of mine was personally lifting an actual metric tonne’s worth of cases into cool storage in the ceiling. ↑
8: Unless you take your “punk” to the absolute extreme and turn into some kind of full-on morality-denying anarcho-capitalist. In which case you should say so, because no one likes a fucking nihilist. ↑
9: In the spirit of full disclosure, it’s worth pointing out that while drafting this piece I learned that Jos Ruffell (a director of Garage Project, site of my day job, and himself a BrewDog shareholder) posed a similar (though presumably less sweary) question in the Equity For Punks forums. I have no idea whether Martin and James have read that, or replied, and I hope it’s obvious that I’m speaking just for myself here, as always. ↑

Podcast episodes

Beer Diary Podcast s03e02: Baylands Brewery

3 Comments

Not too long ago, George and I headed out to Newlands (which wasn’t as far away or as, you know, rural as my City-boy brain had somehow assumed) to sit down for chat with Aidan and Nikki of the new Baylands Brewery — a fully-fledged commercial brewery built on tiny-tiny scale in their garage.1 We talk about turning a hobby into a business, juggling the many responsibilities involved, plans for the future — and how the whole enterprise very-nearly fell apart right at the outset. Since we recorded, the official launch night took place at Golding’s Free Dive here in Wellington — to apparent smashing success — so keep an eye out for more Baylands beer popping up around town; I definitely enjoyed my glass of American IPA, and (as you’ll hear) our two Baylands-brewed Beers of the Week.

Continue reading Beer Diary Podcast s03e02: Baylands Brewery →

Mediawatch, Rambles and rants

‘Made to Match’

6 Comments
'Made to Match' landing page
‘Made to Match’ landing page, with standard age-verification nonsense

So, it looks like Lion — one half of the local brewing duopoly, and ultimately a subsidiary of Kirin* — is taking out a series of infomercials on TVNZ. Product placement so thick it amounts to entire blocks of ‘programming’ was probably the invention of home improvement shows and hardware stores, and maybe brewery marketing departments just got jealous and wanted in on the action.

Al Brown, one of those forever-wandering-with-a-film-crew TV chefs, will host ‘Made to Match’: a series about beer and food matching, apparently including the range of beers available, some background on their styles, and what goes well with what. I couldn’t be more behind the idea of normalising beer in this way — the near-constant conjunction of “and wine” whenever the topic turns to good food is grindingly sad — but there’s a lot to lament in the pitch of this show / ad campaign / thing. I’m honestly not sure what category of production it belongs in, from what I’ve seen so far; whether it’s a series of daytime advertorials, online-only webisodes, or an actual ‘show’ that’ll be broadcast on to the physical teevee box. But then, “television”, much like “phone”, is one of those increasingly-abstracted gadget-concepts, anyway.1 It all has the same effect, in the end, especially when the programming-advertising boundary is blurred this hard.

It takes ‘origin-fudging’ — the increasingly common practice of being, shall we say, less than entirely truthful about the history and production of various beers — to a depressingly deep new low. Here, every brand is presented in a maximally-distorted way, just as the marketing department would like. The mere fact that all of these beers are produced and/or distributed by one company is entirely elided, and Lion itself only rates a mention in the beer-descriptions department during the (hilariously straight-faced) write-up for Lion Red. Even Steinlager is treated almost as if it were a from different company, and Lion / Kirin* are entirely absent from the website’s WHOIS information; there, it’s all TVNZ. I’m sure it’s all well within the rules about product placement — tellingly, Lion’s own corporate policy seems only to care about when other people use their products as props, and doesn’t commit to being open about when it does so — or at least that someone on a healthy retainer stands poised to so argue, but it does stink a bit.

"Beck's", trying hard to look German
“Beck’s”, trying very hard to look German

The beers that Lion brew here in New Zealand under license are hyped as long-heritaged international imports as hard as possible: Beck’s is “the No. 1 German beer in the world” and “…brewed according to Reinheitsgebot”;2 Guinness is “known worldwide as the beer of Ireland, and the gold standard for stouts”;3 Oranjeboom dates “back to 1528” and is a “popular European beer [which] originates from Breda in Holland”; Stella Artois’ story “dates back to 1366” and its “the best selling Belgian beer brand in the world”.4 On the more-local front, gdmfing Crafty Beggars make an appearance with Lion still not feeling proud enough of their brewers and their beer to admit that the ‘rogue brewers’ are their employees, while Speight’s ‘Distinction Ale’ happily crows about winning several awards despite the categories they were in being directly contradictory to how the brand is marketed. And just look at how the ‘James Squires’ beers are steeped in their Colonial Australian history and bursting with references to the country’s first commercial brewer, deftly skating past the uncomfortable fact that the beers are merely named after him; there’s no history here, just brandwank.

The blurbs always fall just short of outright lies — their lawyers are too good for that — but, taken together, form a teetering pile of half-truths and non-sequiturs that looks very-carefully-crafted indeed to achieve maximum bullshit without opening up liability, and to maintain the illusion that this is a diverse range of beers picked for their inherent qualities and suitability to the task, rather than a (presumably) bought-and-paid-for exclusive placement which locks out all other local and international candidates. All that said, if you delve into the “Terms & Conditions”, Lion do finally front up and say ‘Hello! We’re in charge of this thing, by the way.’ — and the statistics are predictably grim on what miniscule fraction of humanity actually clicks through to pages labelled that. But it’s mostly there to completely disclaim, in the usual spineless boilerplate, any promises of accuracy — their marketing code of practice, equally tellingly, contains no particular commitments about being truthful and forthcoming with the facts — and to (weirdly) suggest that I’m not allowed to link to them without their express permission, in an apparent complete misunderstanding of how the internet works.

Crafty Beggars blurbs
The disingenuous Crafty Beggars bottle blurbs

Big breweries (and Lion, in particular) have a habit of playing their brands — and thereby their consumers — off against each other, in a way that’ll easily leave the impression that ‘Made to Match’ is better-rounded than it is. For everyone who makes beer who isn’t Lion, it’ll do a tremendous disservice-by-omission, and so it damn well better have an enormously prominent “this program brought to you by Lion” kind of disclaimer front and center — especially (but not only) since it’s airing on, and seemingly produced in substantial cooperation with, the national broadcaster. Little buried disclosures (like what they have so far) are only ever the absolute minimum, they’re not automatically exculpatory.

It’s going to be worth watching to see how they play that kind of thing — and to find out more about TVNZ’s involvement — but I’m not optimistic enough to think it’ll be anything other than a sin-counting exercise in seeing how shameless they are, rather than waiting to see if they front up decently. Which is a real shame, because there’s a huge need for mass-media beer education of an engaged and entertaining sort, but you just can’t trust the Big Breweries to handle this stuff in any kind of fair and honest and genuinely informative way.5 Their structure, their contrived “brand stories”, their peculiar kind of cowardice when it comes to the realities of their history and how they operate, and their ingrained shitty haibts just won’t let them, it seems — their approach to selling their products is entirely at odds with providing information.

The 'Made to Match' footer, crediting everyone except Lion
The ‘Made to Match’ website’s footer, crediting everyone except Lion

*: This post originally phrased Lion’s ultimate parentage as “Kirin / Mitsubishi” which I’ve since learned isn’t correct. Kirin is a member of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, but that’s not the same thing as being a subsidiary of the car maker, which was the impression I initially had, and passed on, here. Thanks to Danny at Lion for the correction (July 2018).
1: I don’t own a television set, but I watch a fair amount of ‘TV’ — though not like it was traditionally broadcast, an episode at a time, once a week. And my phone spends a tiny fraction of its time as a “phone” — most of the time it’s a really little computer with sensory capabilities that more resemble a goddamn Trek-esque tricorder. Welcome to the future. (Now where’s my flying car?) ↑
2: Even though it’s not, for several reasons; the claim to follow a German law is just one of many ways they insinuate a German origin. ↑
3: It’s definitely not that, though it is for Irish Dry Stout, a corner of the black-beer spectrum that it basically invented. Speaking as a long-suffering bartender, way too many people see black beer and think “Guinness” and — if they happen not to like Guinness — shut themselves off from a wonderful range of options. ↑
4: Glengarry / Hancock’s hilariously inept promotional video has been ridiculed plenty — but still not enough. For present purposes, it’s worth re-watching as the least-subtle-ever use of that slippage between “beer” and “beer brand”. ↑
5: It’s an utterly trivial example, really, but the contradiction between the inclusion of a pretty-good ‘Why you should always pour your beer into a glass’ section and the classic “everyone at a barbeque drinking from the bottle, with the label carefully-but-casually held facing outwards” montage of the introductory video speaks volumes right out of the gate. ↑

Actual Diary entries

666 ‘Black Se7en’ IPA

8 Comments
666 'Black Se7en' IPA
666 ‘Black Se7en’ IPA

The days are just packed. There’s a mixed-blessing over-abundance of wonderful beery stuff in my life at the moment; much of which I’d love to be writing about, but I’m finding — for the moment1 — it’s all jostled up in my brain and forming a bit of a tangle. This happens from time to time, I’ve found, and is attributable to various causes which range from the everyday to the idiosyncratic. Back when I was a bartender, ranting and raving, armed with a beer and a keyboard, in the middle of the night, it was easier to navigate — partially because it seems I really am a nocturnal person attempting (with various levels of success) to live a day-walking life. As much as I love it, and as much as off-the-cuff rambling (whether praise or condemnation) about beer flows as freely as exhaling, I have found myself in mildly-daunted bordering-on-freaking-out mode a few times,2 and thereby unusually quiet. Which doesn’t seem a very me thing to be at all, so enough of that. This online incarnation of my Diary actually started as a way to start my brain moving properly again — more about that, another day — so we’re hopefully back on a well-worn path.3

666 'Black Se7en' IPA tap badge
666 ‘Black Se7en’ IPA tap badge (with six 7s)

I met this beer last week, as we prepped for a Craft Beer College tasting (at which I was co-hosting — so, you know, disclosures) which included it as part of a run-down on the role of different malts in the making of craft beer. Graham Graeme Mahy, the man behind 666 Brewing,4 is one of those insufficiently-sung (if not actually “unsung”) characters in the local industry, and his beers reputedly never last long on Hashigo’s taps. ‘Black Se7en’ leaps bodily down that numerological well that brewers seem so attracted to, referencing not just the Pitt-Freeman movie wherein Kevin Spacey is the bad guy and there’s a severed head in a FedEx box,5 but 7 hops, 7 malts, 7% ABV and 77 IBU. It’s a little belabored, especially when you learn that “666” itself is a similar nod to Mahy’s June 1966 birthday, but the resulting beer is unarguably worthy.

Sprig & Fern 'Harvest Pilsner' embargoed badge
Sprig & Fern ‘Harvest Pilsner’ embargoed badge

I neglected to make any notes or take a photo of the glass I had on the night (since I was, you know, working), so I resolved to swing by Hashigo on my way to work the next day — which did mean committing to a pre-noon beer for the sake of these ramblings; the things I do in the name of research and completeness. It’d been yanked off the taps to clear the way for a Fresh Hop Friday tap takeover, but evidently I wasn’t alone in thinking it worth re-visiting, as Sam & Dave had emptied the line into a jug rather than down the drain. And — generally speaking, whatever the time of day — I do love a Black IPA, both as a consumable liquid and as an intellectual exercise. Beer styles are useful things, but reifying them and pretending they have any kind of actual independent existence and/or any real stability over time is just madness and likely to turn you into some kind of pedantic trainspotting anorak — and, worse, diminish your enjoyment of tasty things. “Black IPA” is almost singularly capable of doing some peoples’ heads in — and this is the one that finally got to me, with all its aggravating deliciousness.

Aggravating because this really does make a nonsense of the idea of a Black IPA. There’s a lot6 to be said / pondered / argued about the style (such as it is); what it should be called, what its defining characters are — and whether it exists at all, or deserves to. I’m perfectly happy with a world that contains both Hoppy Porter and Black IPA, and I’ve recently been convinced that “Cascadian Dark Ale” isn’t as daft a term as I initially thought. I like the Scrabble Bag Full Of Adjectives approach to beer style naming wherein brewers seem comfortable just throwing terms together in novel ways that are nonetheless capable of economically communicating their intent. Meanings evolve, concepts are recombined, and nothing is carved in stone. Beer is like that partially because language is like that.7 So I think there can be Hoppy Porter which isn’t Black IPA, and vice versa; I’d see it as a matter of emphasis, and starting point — which element you’re tweaking, which is your curveball adjective and which is your foundational noun. But ‘Black Se7en’ isn’t like that, it’s merely-black IPA, with a shameful lower-case b.

666 tap handle, with suitably-demonic back-lighting
666 tap handle, with suitably-demonic back-lighting thanks to Hashigo’s shelves

That’s because Black Se7en is apparently brewed with a surprisingly-contemptible product from Weyermann (a German malting company, and one of the world’s giant beer-ingredient providers) called “Sinamar®”. A dark roasted-malt extract, its sole reason for existing is to impart colour without a traceable hint of flavour. Brewers have some clever tricks for minimising the extract of roasty flavours from malt — like throwing it in the mash tun at the last minute as the wort is run off — but this just seems like a bridge too far. That it touts the avoidance of additive-listing regulations and compliance with the (god-damn motherfucking) Reinheitsgebot as advantages betrays the pointless sneakiness of it as mere food colouring. Why not release a whole freakin’ rainbow of Se7ens — what was the point of the blackness? Or is it some kind of very-devious post-modern meta-level commentary on the state of the “style”?

If you’re reading this, I’ve probably ruined your chance to run a fair test, but if you can put a glass in front of someone without telling them how it’s made, it’d be fascinating to see what they make of it, and whether they report any flavour notes that you’d expect from darker malts. They shouldn’t, given the design, but I couldn’t help second-guessing what the hell was going on in my brain as I drank it. Perception is like that, of course, but the interestingness of the exercise couldn’t quite soothe my outrage at the thought of all that effort going to jump through hoops for mere colour and compliance with a “Purity Law” for which there exist no sufficiently-large scare-quotes. It put me in mind of all the engineering effort poured in to making modern life, and particularly its gadgets, fit within ludicrously-strict readings of religious rules about the Sabbath. There’s a lot to admire in the ingenuity, and a certain charm in the mindset, but it just seems like a tragic misapplication of cleverness.

The beer’s damn good, though. And that calmed me right down.

Diary II entry #2xx, 666 'Black Se7en' IPA
Diary II entry #2xx,8 666 ‘Black Se7en’ IPA

Original notes: 666 Black Se7en IPA 3/5/13 @ Hashigo, on my way to work. Had this for a CBC tasting last night, and it’s motivatingly interesting + delicious. Actual, literal Black IPA, in instructive ways. Some influence of the gdmfing RHGB. (7%, leftovers for Fresh Hop Friday.) So weird that this should be so worthy but philosophically annoying-but-fascinating. It’s gorgeous, IPA-aromatic, satisfyingly bitter, too-drinkable for 7% (especially at breakfast!), balanced + damn good. But… but… Why black? Why?

1: Where “the moment” = the last few months, admittedly. Let’s go with deep time. ↑
2: Particularly, I’ll freely admit for the sake of brain-clearing, with the editorship of The Pursuit of Hoppiness, which I inherited when Kate Jordan moved over to the Melb.. It’s a damn fine publication, and I’m excited to have a crack at it, but it’s been an oddly-intimidating thing to tackle, given its pedigree, its profile, and the fact that a whole bunch of people pour work into it. I’m very much accustomed to working on my own, in the dark. The transition’s proving tricky, but I’ll get there. (He says, as he hacks out a personal blog post for the sake of greasing the rusted cogs of his mind — and if you can’t air a mea culpa and a minor confessional in the footnotes of your own website, what the hell is the point of having one?) ↑
3: An apt metaphor, since my other brain-cranking trick mostly involves hopping on my bike and going for a blat around some of Wellington’s many bays and up and over a few of its equally-many hills. The cycling-fanatic and craft-beer-nerd crossover is almost as strong, it turns out, as the beer-geek and geek-geek overlap which I’ve revelled in for years. ↑
4: The website’s run-down of their beers is depressingly out of date, but experience shows that this happens with basically every brewery, there being way too many items forever on the To Do list — a point beautifully lampooned by the in-progress page for Panhead. Graham Mahy, however, earns all sorts of bonus points for using the word “plethora”, something I’ve loved since Three Amigos. He’s also apparently the true creator of Moa’s original beer, now known as ‘Methode’ — which further suggests that they can continue to fuck right off with their incessant suggestion that Josh Scott is “the brewer”. ↑
5: Er, Spoiler Alert, I suppose. (Or maybe it’s a UPS box. I can’t recall.) ↑
6: See — just for example and just from myself — the entries for Yeastie Boys ‘PKB’, Deschutes ‘Hop in the Dark’, Croucher ‘Patriot’, Golden Ticket ‘Black Emperor’, Funk Estate Black IPA (which seems to be my fullest exposition on the idea), and Left Coast ‘The Wedge’. Close reading of those will probably reveal me even contradicting myself in my take on the phenomenon, but that’s kind of my point. ↑
7: In my favourite modern example, “peruse” is shifting from meaning reading thoroughly to mere browsing.a “Lager” comes from the German word for storing something away, but almost all modern lagers are brewed at breakneck speed. “Stout” was once an adjective appended to a subset of porters, but has come to be seen as a noun for a separate category; one of many kinds of non-porter ale. ↑
— a: In a brilliant coincidence, I found an article on the point which also references Three Amigos.
8: By which I mean two hundred and something, I think. I’ve got a stack of coasters and Post-Its and such to transcribe back in to the actual Diary, so I’ve somewhat lost count. ↑

Podcast episodes

Beer Diary Podcast s03e01: A Very Good Friday

11 Comments

Back with unusual promptness — which is hopefully a good omen — George and I sat down on Friday for a few beers and a somewhat-supersized season opener for another round of the podcast. We try a couple of new-ish releases, and one bottle that’d been sitting around waiting for the right occasion. And, unusually, one of our Beers of the Week turns out to be something of a dud, or at least a disappointment. Conversation turns variously to good and bad advice on glassware and temperature, the wealth of new developments in the local scene, and (inevitably, it seems) the origin-fudging that I complained about last time.

Continue reading Beer Diary Podcast s03e01: A Very Good Friday →

Podcast episodes

Beer Diary Podcast s02e09: 2012 Year in Review

14 Comments

Back for a second ‘Year in Review’ and in moderate danger of starting a tradition, we sit down for a trio of appropriate beers and ponder 2012; a year full of great beers, big beer-related news, and mercifully few apocalypses. We stick pretty-much to last year’s categories (such as we had); I offer a few suggestions for things to make sure you’re reading / watching / using, and then get down to pondering what 2012 might go down in beer history as the Year Of, before reminiscing on our beers of the year.

Continue reading Beer Diary Podcast s02e09: 2012 Year in Review →