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 Beer Diary, 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.

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:

• Boak & Bailey’s ‘Let’s Go Long’ collection. If you’re ever short of reading material, checking in here is a wise move, and it looks like they’re planning on making a tradition out of it — which is good news for all concerned and something for us Antipodeans to aspire to joining in. Ron Pattinson contributed a head-crushing thirty-five tonnes of words in the form of his work-in-progress history of porter, which is worth a look for the detail into which real history — of the myth-busting and evidence-gathering kind — must necessarily go. But my favourite so far is the curators’ own piece on the (often shamefully untold) history of beer and women. (B&B’s site also sets the gold standard for lists of disclosures and pre-emptive responses to lazy PR.)
• 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.

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. ↑

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.

• Anything by 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?
• A meta piece on the undying “craft beer” debate, from a brewer making the simple point that the term obviously means something, and sometimes that’s enough.
• 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.
• A piece on cider versus “cider”, which needs a great-deal more name-and-shame, though I’m not qualified to engage in such — if anyone can prod Kieran Haslett-Moore into ranting out a local version of Pete Brown’s recent piece, that’d be great.
• 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? ↑