Rambles and rants

BrewDog, ‘Boundary Road’, and becoming the villain

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'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

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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.

As always, a direct download is available, there’s a podcast-specific RSS feed, and you should be able to get us on iTunes. George and myself can also both be reached on the Twitterthing, or you can leave comments here or on the Bookface; feedback is absolutely always welcome. Cheers!

Baylands Brewery, almost in its entirety
Baylands Brewery, almost in its entirety
Baylands English ESB
B.O.T.W. #1: Baylands English ESB
Baylands Vanilla Imperial Stout
B.O.T.W. #2: Baylands Vanilla Imperial Stout
Baylands' three-tap kegerator
Super-awesome three-tap kegerator
Fermenter and ancient DB taps
300L fermenter and ancient DB taps
Lots of shiny steel, not much space
Lots of shiny steel, not much space
A bin of good omen
A bin of good omen

— Show notes:

  • (00.45) I’m an appalling City Boy for thinking that Newlands is “the outskirts”.
  • (03.20) The extra ‘Hello!’ from George & I is, from memory, us greeting Aidan & Nikki’s daughter, who wandered in from time to time. Unexpected recording session guests are something of a tradition, that started with George & Robyn’s cats.
  • (04.55) Beer of the Week #1: Baylands English E.S.B..
  • (07.50) Nikki’s blog, ‘Wife of a Brewer’, is definitely worth a look, and here’s the beer-as-baking post I was talking about, specifically.
  • (11.00) People often lament the lack of interaction between neighbours in the modern world. I hereby propose using the contents of various houses’ recycling bins to triage potential people worth introducing yourself to.
  • (19.30) A clever addition, this year, to the annual hop-fest that is Malthouse’s West Coast IPA Challenge was a kind of amateur / wildcard round. Since recording, it’s been and judged and gone, with Ryan Crawford taking the gong. He now gets the chance to brew (this weekend) his beer on Baylands’ kit to enter into the Main Event.
  • (24.55) Baylands’ debut beer was indeed a big American IPA — but not quite the batch they intended. We’ll get back to that in a bit.
  • (25.30) Beer of the Week #2: Baylands Vanilla Imperial Stout.
  • (37.40) Recommendations: Black Dog is the first thing to Aidan’s mind, and I have to say — as a fairly strident Big Brewery skeptic — that it really is a pleasant surprise; outright D.B.-owned, but apparently still operating with near-total creative control in the brewers’ hands, and a nicely-presented little bar / tasting room / off-license. And, in a weird coincidence, I was just talking about iStout Floats the other day on Twitter — you all really, really, really should have one.
  • (39.20) If you follow Nikki on Twitter — and you still should — you’ll see a lot of competition-related stuff, admittedly. It apparently pays off.
  • (40.30) George’s recommendation: Gunnamatta, still. (And fair enough!) Mine: Renaissance ‘Scotch on Rye’, a kinda-sorta mini-Stonecutter; lovely. I’ve had it a few times since, and stand by the recommendation, though George did recently try it and wasn’t so taken by it, so — as always — YMMV.
  • (42.10) 8 Wired Grand Cru is totally worth trying, and worth hoarding.
  • (44.20) And it might be time for a Central North roadtrip, since we do hear such nice things about Good George and Brew.
  • (50.50) Well, not at Hashigo on the 16th, in the end. The story goes that the queued-up first batch wasn’t quite as it should’ve been, and Aidan decided to postpone the launch until the next was ready, a few weeks later. The launch night — at Golding’s Free Dive, instead — seemed to be a cracking success, and the beer was pretty damn good. (It also coincided with Hashigo’s New-Zealand-launch of ParrotDog’s ‘BloodyDingo’, their GABS beer, and so gave Wellington another awesome night of Plural Beer Things On.)
  • (51.00) Baylands’ Facebook page, Twitter profile, website — and homebrew supply.
  • (51.50) Cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket. Audio editing done in Audacity. Habitual thanks to both.

1: For completeness and/or nostalgia, it’s worth pointing out that this is our second episode from a garage in which operates a very-little brewery. s01e05, way back when, was recorded at Garage Project — long before I worked there and long before it was (nearly) full of great big shiny steel tanks. ↑

Mediawatch, Rambles and rants

‘Made to Match’

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'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

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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

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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.

As always, a direct download is available, there’s a podcast-specific RSS feed, and you should be able to get us on iTunes. George and myself can also both be reached on the Twitterthing, or you can leave comments here or on the Bookface. Feedback is always welcome, but doubly so at the beginning of a new ‘season’; is there anything else we can do to help? Multi-part uploads / chapter chunks? Posting on YouTube / anywhere else?

For the record, I’m not planning to transition the blog to podcast-only; there’s plenty to go up here of the familiar rambling and ranting and reminiscing kinds. I am, in fact, drafting a Sydney Travelogue post while this episode uploads…

— Show notes:

  • (1.30) Easter Trading Laws. My resort to saying “March or April” reminds of the ludicrous “Computus Problem”, about which I once foot-notedly rambled, while drinking a Taieri George (appropriately enough).
  • (2.30) cf Matthew 27:52.
  • (3.30) Thanks to TableTop Day, I was also out and about at midnight, and now feel I should add a note to counter my own enthusiasm: the circumstances do conspire a bit to make Easter Friday some kind of Pre-loading Olympics. The crowds shambling to the pub to greet those 12 o’clock openings were awfully munter-ish.
  • (3.40) Here, let me find it for you: Harmontown.
  • (4.50) While we await the latest Census results, the Wikipedia is — as always — a fine place to start.
  • (5.10) Beer of the Week #1: Epic ‘Mosaic’.1 Which is heaps easier for my lisp to navigate, inherently worthy as an individual beer, and genuinely hilarious as a collection of little references and bits of gentle self-satire.
  • (9.00) My bad, the IPA Glass was a project of Dogfish Head and Sierra Nevada, which makes vastly more sense. Adding to the suspicion that this might all just be a load of marketing wank, it seems the design isn’t that new — nor beer-specific (except for the addition of nucleation sites).
  • (11.45) ‘Get More From Your Beer’ was great fun at Beervana and at the GKBF. I put a blogified version of the general gist of it online here a little while ago.
  • (15.10) Maybe I did guess right; it looks like us English-speakers formed “stein” from the German for “stoneware”.
  • (18.20) Beer of the Week #2: Tuatara Tripel. ‘Ardennes’ was something I liked a lot, when I managed to remember that it existed — meanwhile, that Diary entry now gets the bulk of its traffic from searches for “Kegtris”, when they occasionally occur. Neil Miller, on the Malthouse blog, went a little into the background, though he’s oddly coy about not knowing the “real story”; last I heard, he’s still on the brewery payroll. (Edited 30 July 2016 to strike that last part. Apparently Neil, at this point, hadn’t done any work for the brewery for a few years. Perhaps, if more people were better-practiced at telling us who they work for and when, we wouldn’t have to speculate. For what it’s worth, I belatedly apologise.)
  • (22.25) My bad, again, Tuataras are reptiles — what they’re aren’t, is lizards.
  • (24.10) If anyone needs a primer on Moa’s many sins, start with their recent IPO. (Meanwhile — as at the time of writing this, at least — it’s hardly a rockstar stock.)
  • (25.20) There are a few bits of history-ramble in my Trappist Dance Card notes.
  • (27.40) George probably means a twisty-wire cage top. Twist-tops aren’t so classy.
  • (28.00) Temperature, and surprisingly-ranty advice thereon.
  • (33.40) I’m enough of a geek that I want answers and models for how fast the temperature of my glass of beer will change in ambient air (at various pressures and in various glasses), and I want to know how much condensation is going to wind up in my frosted-pint beer. I’m failing to find the right tools, though. Help appreciated.
  • (35.35) Drinking from the bottle / can, which again makes me want to do some actual pen-and-paper physics. Maybe I’ll have to hit the books.
  • (40.00) Beer of the Week #4: West Coast ‘The Artist’ 2012 a.k.a. Dave Kurth’s Mysterious Barleywine. West Coast Brewery still exists, thanks to some somewhat unsavory company-law juggling. All completely legal and par for the course — which is exactly why it pisses me off; this stuff shouldn’t happen, and it shouldn’t so-readily screw the very people who weren’t at fault. Grumble. Belatedly, I also just spotted that The Artist was Alice Galletly’s penultimate beer, her #364.
  • (42.40) Luke Robertson’s piece was at BrewsNews.com.au, and was mostly about insanely-multiply-hopped brews — including Dave’s farewell brew, which will be at MarchFest in Nelson this weekend.
  • (42.50) He’s updated his Twitter handle and registered a domain, at least.
  • (45.30) Apparently, I deleted my still-full SD card of photos from my Christchurch trip like a complete Muppet. Kicking myself about that on a regular basis.
  • (51.30) Origin-fudging, again, inevitably. The American legal system, with depressing predictability, made it even worse. #facepalm.
  • (54.20) Tragically, I wanted to praise them for the awesome barcode; it’s a New York skyline, for crying out loud! But white ink on shiny aluminum is hard to photograph.
  • (57.40) Panhead also exists, so far, as a parked domain, and a Twitter handle.
  • (1.01.00) Forgive us for being on a Wellington-centric run here for a bit, but these are boom times indeed. Craft Beer Capital’s ‘Hopstock’ — expanding on a Tuatara / Fork & Brewer-only event from last year — is next-next weekend, 10-12 April. And I seriously want that artwork on a t-shirt. If you’re keen on an impulsive weekend away, BrewDay & MarchFest — which I think are both set in CamelCase — are mere days away.
  • (1.04.55) I mean “chacun à son goût”, though the long-suffering law graduate in me always wishes that the much-more-fun-to-say Latin version — de gustibus non est disputandum — had more currency in modern conversation.
  • (1.05.10) The Rising Tide. Warms my cynical heart, it does.
  • (1.07.30) On the Beer List: Te Radar, who did great things for the Beer Awards, and a neat little fundraiser / awareness-raiser for Kaibosh (which recently won a rather-big-deal award and is well-worth getting on board with — hint, hint).
  • (1.11.30) Recommendations: Townshend’s many beers. I’ve been reminded by the GKBF and the impending third season of Game of Thrones — torrents of the first episode of which are probably cratering the internet as I write these notes. Track down his beers, give him a prod on the Twitters to say Hi / thanks / try to provoke him.
  • (1.15.40) Ommegang made an ‘Iron Throne’ Blonde Ale — the style presumably referencing that shitbag Joffrey (which hopefully isn’t a spoiler for anyone).
  • (1.16.30) “Lancaster”? I mean Lannister, obviously. It’s been too long.
  • (1.17.10) Close. It’s just Hazelnut Brown Nectar.
  • (1.19.50) This insight into Rogue came from @MattSNZ, on the Twitters — who I had the pleasure of bumping into in person at the aforementioned Pomeroy’s.
  • (1.22.10) Thanks to a generous 2012-vintage bottle shared by my flatmate, I didn’t have to suffer through the whole long weekend without a Taieri George. Phew.
  • (1.22.30) Cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket. Audio editing done in Audacity. Habitual thanks to both.
Epic 'Mosaic', label detail
Epic ‘Mosaic’, label detail with cute sparkly text
The not-so-new 'IPA Glass'
The not-so-new ‘IPA Glass’ is on the right (Source)
Hofbrau Maibock
Hofbrau Maibock, in a less-ridiculous half-Maß
Tuatara's new 'Eye of Sauron' cap
Tuatara’s scary new ‘Eye of Sauron’ bottlecap
Tuatara's cute little Tuatara bottlecap
Tuatara’s old cute little Tuatara bottlecap
Toohey's 'New', Supercold
Toohey’s ‘New’ — Supercold!
Heady Topper's plea
Heady Topper’s plea / request / demand
Sixpoint 'Three Beans', origin-fudging
Sixpoint ‘Three Beans’, origin-fudging
Rogue's water claim
Rogue’s ultra-subtle satire / complete nonsense

1: In the interests of full disclosure, Epic did send me a bottle as a sample — which I didn’t realise until I’d actually tried it on my own dime, anyhow. But, you know, completeness.

Podcast episodes

Beer Diary Podcast s02e09: 2012 Year in Review

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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.

As always, a direct download is available, there’s a podcast-specific RSS feed, and you should be able to get us on iTunes. George and myself can also both be reached on the Twitterthing, or you can leave comments here or on the Bookface.

— Show notes:

  • (0.50) We did indeed do this last year.
  • (1.40) And the full ramble on awards was slightly before that.
  • (2.40) Beer of the Week #1: Liberty ‘Alpha Dogg’. Jo sat down with us (and Mike) for s02e03. Mike’s new brewery now has a name, too; Panhead Custom Ales. Inexcusably, and uncharacteristically, I’m lacking photos for a bunch of beers that’ll get mentioned in this episode, including our Beers of the Week. Apologies for that; I’ll attempt to re-solidify my nerdy camera habit.
  • (6.20) The combination of “buttery”, “not bitter” and “rosé” probably gets George removed from Jo’s Christmas Card List. But he really did like Alpha Dogg.
  • (8.00) Blog of the Year: Jono Galuszka’s ‘From Drinker to Brewer’ (the pre-Newspaperisation blog version is still online, and worth a trawl through the archives), with very-honourable-indeed mentions for Alice Galletly’s ‘Beer for a Year’ and Greig McGill’s Awkward Beer Reviews. With heavy Liberty / Beer of the Week #1 connections all round, happily enough. And if you don’t get the My Drunk Kitchen reference, you need to immediately also add Hannah Hart to your Twittermachine and/or Suit of Distracting Bookmarks.
  • (12.40) Website of the Year: Untappd (appified interfaces are available, naturally, for iOS and Android), which does indeed make a cameo appearance in one particular A.B.R. episode. I’m on there with the same underscored handle as I had to use on Twitter (he says, cursing his very-common name). I don’t join in the numerical / bottlecappy ratings for various philosophical reasons, but they’ve recently confirmed that you don’t muck up the statistics if you abstain. So all good.
  • (16.10) 2012, Year of the x. Mainstreaming, says George; Pretender, says Phil — in a nice coincidence, and a fitting difference-in-approach/temperament. Boundary Road and Crafty Beggars are obviously the highest-profile examples, from the Big Faking Small end of the spectrum. The Small Faking Existence, or Small-to-Medium Fudging Origin end is more depressing, blunting my usual impulse to name and shame. ‘Dr. Hops’ is a bleak example of the former — although, I’m mortified to report (given my praise for them on this point), Yeastie Boys have begun a determined back-sliding on the giving of credit where due; it turns out that mentions of Steve Nally and/or Invercargill are slowly being expunged from their labels. Fudging Origin is just weird, too; Liberty aren’t the only ones to do it, but I just don’t understand why it seems like an option worth taking. I might have to compile a Wall Of Shame, just for completeness. I’ll have to do a full post on ‘Hancock & Co.’, too, and what a contemptible pile of bullshit they are — while arrogantly claiming the “NZBeer” Twitter handle, for fuck’s sake.
  • (29.20) Beer of the Week #2: Yeastie Boys ‘Gunnamatta’. There were a number of ill-timed and unfortunate mis-steps at Invercargill over the past few months, which combined to cause (among other things) the Great Yeastie Drought of 2012-2013 — Stu’s post explaining which is a masterpiece of honesty and fair dealing, which either compensates for their apparent creeping habit of Origin Fudging, or puts it in enragingly stark relief (I can’t decide which).
  • (31.10) CNNNN did some hiliariously brutal man-on-the-street stuff on this.
  • (33.20) As noted above, the shortage continued, and was caused by reasons deeper than I realised at the time. We’re nearly out of the woods, though.
  • (34.10) Beer of the Year, and our criteria confusingly clarified.
  • (36.45) The ‘karaoke for the deaf’ version of ‘Torn’ still cracks me up.
  • (36.50) Phil’s (work) Beer of the Year: Garage Project ‘Day of the Dead’.
  • (38.20) Phil’s (non-work) Beer of the Year: Afterwork pints; including, among others, Stone & Wood ‘Pacific Ale’, ParrotDog ‘FlaxenFeather’, Three Boys Golden Ale, Moo Brew Pilsner, Garage Project ‘Hāpi Daze’, Hallertau Saison, and (once I remember it, a little later in the episode), Yeastie Boys ‘Golden Perch’. Only very broadly ‘of a kind’, but all just absolutely lovely, relaxing beers.
  • (40.30) Pete Mitcham’s ‘When only the rest will do’ is excellent.
  • (41.40) George’s Beer of the Year: Yeastie Boys ‘Gunnamatta’.
  • (42.50) Phil’s Glass of Beer of the Year: Liberty ‘Rennals Towards Muriwai’, a multiply-gorgeous thing, for oodles of both inherent and circumstantial reasons.
  • (47.40) George’s Glass of Beer of the Year: a specific Yeastie Boys ‘Gunnamatta’. I mentioned my own Beach Gunnamattas back when referencing my entry for the ‘Desert Island Beers’ series, and the mandatory Paul Kelly track is here, for easy re-playing.
  • (50.30) Honourable G.O.B.O.T.Y. mentions: Hallertau ‘Funkonnay’, what a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster beer should taste like. And Bright Brewery’s ‘Resistance Red’ and/or Feral’s ‘Watermelon Warhead’ from GABS, or perhaps one of the beers I had back at the beloved Wig & Pen.
  • (55.10) Beer of the Week #3: Emerson’s ‘JP’ 2012. In our last episode, we talked about The Acquisition (he says, in a way that makes him want to pronounce the capital letters like Australians do when talking about their Constitutional crisis as “The Dismissal”). I think I’ve had all the JPs (the “Js-P”?) over the years; the first one in my Diary is from the dim-dark recesses of 2008.
  • (56.55) Honourable mentions, more generally: Renaissance’s ‘Great Punkin”, which made up for the badly-flavoured beers George endured in the U.S., and Garage Project ‘Ziggy’s Carrot Cake Ale’, which caused fire-hazard log-jam queues at Beervana.
  • (1.01.30) Now I can’t remember the name of the tied house which uses “free house” in its signage. Hopefully a commenter can help, since it does so nicely tie the ‘Year of the x’ themes from this year and last together.
  • (1.03.00) Fork & Brewer’s pilsner is a very decent afterwork pint, but also a sad case in marketing; the brewer(s?) made a tasty North-German-esque dry pilsner but then the Overbosses handed naming duties over to the ad agency they work with. On seeing “pilsner”, reading Wikipedia and/or not thinking very hard (or asking the beer’s creator many/any questions), they named it “Bohemian Hipster”, which is both a) boringly predictable and b) off by about 600 km.
  • (1.05.00) On the Beer List: Wil Wheaton. Happily, in the intervening time between recording and posting, I think I’ve figured out just the beer to send him. I shall endeavour to actually get it in the post as soon as I’m back at work next week. He’s totally worth following on Twitter, is active on the aforementioned Untappd, and runs the ‘Tabletop’ show on Felicia Day‘s awesome Geek & Sundry YouTube channel — and is, therefore, Our Kind Of Geek very many times over.
  • (1.08.15) Badass Digest is indeed a cornucopia of awesome things.
  • (1.09.00) ‘Yumyum Beersies’ (or a variation thereon) has shown up in several comics by The Oatmeal, most recently in a rather-on-the-money one about Making Things For The Web — parts of which ring very loud bells, for me.
  • (1.09.30) It was one thousand eight hundred (and ten) years ago, if we assume by “twenty-three” I meant ‘203’; clearly my brain was multiply-broken, here.
  • (1.09.40) Cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket. Audio editing done in Audacity. Habitual thanks to both.
The new Liberty range
The new Liberty range
Dr. Hops taking credit
‘Dr. Hops’ taking credit
Lake Taupo Gunnamatta
Lake Taupo Gunnamatta
Stone & Wood 'Pacific Ale'
Stone & Wood ‘Pacific Ale’
Hallertau 'Funkonnay'
Hallertau ‘Funkonnay’
A beer at the Wig & Pen
A beer at the Wig & Pen
Podcast episodes

The Lost Podcast Archive, Part II

17 Comments

Clearing out the second half of the Lost Podcast Archive, I can here finally present our musings on “Wellington in a Pint”, Beervana 2012 — and, I’m sure most contentiously, on the acquisition of Emerson’s Brewery by the sprawling conglomeration best-known locally as “Lion”.

The W.I.A.P. four-pack provided an incredibly-varied set of Beers Of The Week and an opportunity to ramble through significant upsides and niggling downsides of each. Then, in the much-more-recent past, George and I were re-determined to get back into the podcasting habit, and wound up — relatively accidentally — talking through our reactions to the completely unexpected sale of Emerson’s; the much-loved gateway craft brewery for both of us. I found myself in the middle of the “debate”, such as there was, which was unfamiliar and strange although probably inevitable given the nonsense on both sides.

Next up is our 2012 Year in Review episode — and then we’ll see about rebooting ourselves for Season Three. Meanwhile, as always, direct downloads are available (here and here, respectively), there’s a podcast-specific RSS feed, and you should be able to get us on iTunes. George and myself can also both be reached on the Twitterthing, or you can leave comments here or on the Bookface.

s02e07: Wellington in a Pint & Beervana

— Show notes:

  • (1.15) Beer of the Week #1: Tuatara / Glynn Foster ‘Bye Bye Blanket Man’
  • (3.40) Drinking order is a tricky discipline, sometimes. Usually, the rule is to go mild to strong, light-ish to dark-ish, easy-going to fully-flavoured — or some negotiated compromise therebetween. But some beers will muck you up, usually through the presence of some freakish element. And three of those (i.e., a majority) did that.
  • (6.15) Ben Hana was famous / notorious enough to warrant a detailed Wikipedia page.
  • (7.55) Mike Neilsen (with whom we once casted pod) has since moved on to other pastures (i.e., setting up his own brewery), but I’m sure that’s unrelated.
  • (13.20) Beer of the Week #2: Garage Project / Kolja Schaller ‘Kawakawa Cable Car Classic’
  • (14.20) There still isn’t a filter at work, but there are a few other Clever Tricks in effect. So the Garage Project Haze has lessened considerably.
  • (14.30) Bright Brewery’s delicious ‘Resistance Red’ is gloriously red indeed.
  • (18.00) Seriously — to re-repeat myself — Beastwars kick arse. Get acquainted.
  • (27.00) Beer of the Week #3:ParrotDog / Nathan McEwan ‘Cooked Strait’
  • (30.30) It looks like George was as spot on about cold smoking as he was about Theseus. Full cooking-and-classics marks, that man.
  • (33.10) Beervana 2012. I put up a bloggish version of my “seminar” here, earlier. And — in one of those many odd coincidences of timing that gravitate toward me, here — I just got back from Christchurch and the Great Kiwi Beer Festival, whereat I did a version of same. (Final attendance was apparently ~8,000 people at Beervana; the G.K.B.F. was ~10,000 at once. It was huge, and awesome in many ways. But more about that properly, soon.)
  • (36.55) If you’re just joining us — or even if you aren’t — George v Rex is still very much worth listening to.
  • (38.55) People really do get slightly freaked out by our newfangled digital recorder. If an Englishman starts waving a breathaliser-looking-thing at you at your next beer festival, he might just be podcasting.
  • (48.15) George’s favourites: Three Boys Best Bitter, Cassels Milk Stout, Renaissance ‘Great Punkin’, Yeastie Boys ‘Her Majesty’, Garage Project ‘Ziggy’s Carrot Cake Ale’.
  • (53.20) See? These awards need a memorable / pronounceable acronym.
  • (56.00) The origins of the Llama pie are completely lost to me, now. (Help?) The beer was a Bridge’s Target, though, definitely. And it was great.
  • (58.20) Beer of the Week #4: Yeastie Boys / Andrew Childs ‘Celia Wade-Brown Ale’. Wade-Brown ran with Green Party affiliation, so George’s trivia streak finally breaks, here. From memory, the other ‘spammer’ was the man behind the nearly-up-and-running Baylands Brewery.
  • (1.02.55) My best-effort at an “acceptance speech” went up here not long after.
  • (1.03.40) The (Awkwardly-named) Beer Awards. If you haven’t seen Jo Wood’s chili-eating videos (which occasionally masquerade as beer reviews), seek them out.
  • (1.09.10) Well, we can say that Three Boys Best (for example) is the greatest blahblahblah. We just have to do so at our own Year In Review. (Online soon!)
  • (1.09.20) I did indeed have a bit of a ramble about beer award categories back in season one. Having just done the paperwork on Garage Project’s A.I.B.A. entries for this year, I’m sorely tempted to do so again.
  • (1.10.30) Beervana, again. (Despite me saying I didn’t have anything to say.)
  • (1.12.10) Beer News, which is horribly outdated now, of course. But still: Good George is still going good. And we really will need to roadtrip. A few kegs of their stuff made it to Malthouse for the IPA Challenge, but I’m keen to try their general run. Garage Project’s 24 More (or “24+”) is still going, but much slower than 24/24 did, due to the Extreme Busy-ness of the brewery at the moment.
  • (1.15.10) Recommendation: Harrington’s Anvil. About which Alice did indeed rave, a while back.
  • (1.17.45) We failed, then. We’re still trying. Meanwhile, cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket. Audio editing done in Audacity. Habitual thanks to both.

s02e08: Emerson’s Joins the Lion / Kirin / Mitsubishi Megaconglom

— Show notes:

  • (0.40) Belatedly, this is us explaining where we’ve been all this time.
  • (1.45) Beer of the Week #1: Langham ‘Hip Hop’. We may be slow getting these online — well, I am — but their website hasn’t caught up with the modern world, still.
  • (4.10) For those with hyper-acute hearing, we did actually change rooms, here.
  • (4.50) The “terrible, terrible, terrible” beers were the Crafty Beggars ones…
  • (6.30) Beer News: Beer “olds”, by now. But still, I haven’t had my ramble about the issue, here. So here I am. Boundary Road has since bought Founders, and the rumour mill is spinning so fast as to be audible, but no other news has broken, yet.
  • (11.50) As much as I habitually recommend Beastwars, I endorse Cryptonomicon — and the Stephenson corpus more generally — even moreso.
  • (13.00) I still don’t know. I should set up a secure PGP-laden email account for beer-related leaks from insiders. (BeerLeaks? HoppyLeaks?)
  • (13.50) There is some bad news on the West Coast front; almost all the small-deal investors got shafted and lost everything. (Including my long-vaunted 31¢ share!) The fact that the original managers / directors are still running the place and completely fine — despite the precipitating fuck-up being very much theirs — really raises my middle-class hackles. But that’s a matter for another time, perhaps.
  • (14.10) 1) They don’t owe you anything.
  • (16.00) 2) Reacting to new facts ≠ “knee jerk reactions” ≠ a bad thing.
  • (18.30) 3) Lion have form in both directions.
  • (20.40) 4) Optimism is not inherently worthy.
  • (21.20) 5) Selling out eventually isn’t mandatory.
  • (22.00) Speculation on future sell-outs now surrounds Tuatara. That’ll be interesting to see. They’ve wanted a cash injection for a long time. Who’s offering..?
  • (24.20) Beer of the Week #2: Garage Project ‘Trip Hop’.
  • (26.30) Scratch is a totally worthwhile documentary, if you haven’t already seen it.
  • (28.30) Crafty Beggars really pissed me off — though I was indeed grateful for the counter-example to the appallingly-saccharine Pollyanna / Pangloss holier-than-thou piously-optimistic goo that was been paraded around at the time.
  • (29.40) Boundary Road’s “The Resident” caused me some consternation at the time, and they are — interestingly, and to link in to a previous note — thought to be a prime suitor for Tuatara / Whoever Is Next…
  • (31.50) I think this — let’s call it Heimaey v Eldfell — is the story I’m talking about. The blessed YouTube turned up a video, too; an awesome case of overcoming disaster.
  • (34.50) 6) Lion are investing in Lion. That’s all. (To which I’ll return.)
  • (36.10) Lion and Coromandel have apparently settled, in a way that makes Coromandel pretty happy. So good on them. I hope they got a decent cheque, and have fun with it. It’s still kinda summer, too. You still have time. We didn’t make it that far, in our New Year’s roadtrip, but close. I waved, from the Bay of Plenty.
  • (39.10) 7) Winners and losers.
  • (42.10) Lion investing in Lion, again.
  • (43.20) Recommendations: Coromandel ‘Good As Gold’, which is hopefully okay, and Garage Project ‘Aro Noir’, which has since basically entirely run out, unfortunately.
  • (46.20) On the Beer List: George R.R. Martin. I’m sure he’d like a beer. (And maybe Ian McKellen.)
  • (48.20) Hobbit is definitely more weaponised, but it was still damn good fun.
  • (50.40) Cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket. Audio editing done in Audacity. Habitual thanks to both. We really will get back on the horse. Or the Prancing Pony. Whatever.
Podcast episodes

The Lost Podcast Archive, Part I

5 Comments

In not-at-all breaking news, it is apparently February. When last I wrote, it was as far from New Year’s Eve as it is now; life moves pretty fast. I do feel somewhat guilty for the evident fact that it’s things that make me grumpy which most-easily rouse me from my happily-distracted existence and make me actually publish something.1 I’m in a damn-near-perpetual state of meaning to write something, but as the only-occasionally-wise Jayne Cobb once said — in an episode of Firefly which is just over ten years old but now seems oddly prescient of the current omnishambles in the European meat industry — if wishes were horses, we’d all be eating steak.

Liberty 'La Fin du Temps'
Liberty’s ‘La Fin du Temps’, produced to celebrate the Mayan Apocalypse, which didn’t happen while I was away — as, by now, you know.

Even more unfortunately — given the considerable efforts put in by my co-host and producer extraordinaire, George — the podcast has been even more neglected than it looks. We’d recorded episodes and dispatches as far back as the middle of last year which still haven’t been ‘aired’.2 Life-moving-fast would always get in the way of me posting them when I wanted to and should’ve done, which would then kick in truly maladaptive and dim-witted procrastinatory circuitry in my brain that somehow fools itself into thinking that maybe the answer to annoying delay is more delay.

Speaking (as I slightly was) of the calendar rolling around, the arrival of 2013 prompted us to record a Year In Review episode. Getting back in the saddle (to inadvertently return to the horsemeat topic) was great fun, but I’d be intolerably remiss if I didn’t finally also upload the Lost Episodes. So I’ll do that in a couple of compendium posts before getting on with the show proper — because I am as much of a pedantic completionist as I am a scatterbrained procrastinator.

So here they are for the non-zero numbers of people who have (graciously) hassled me for them, and as not-actually-that-out-of-date historical documents in their own right. As always, direct downloads are available (here and here, respectively), there’s a podcast-specific RSS feed, and you should be able to get us on iTunes. George and myself can also both be reached on the Twitterthing, or you can leave comments here or on the Bookface.

s02e05: West Coast IPA Challenge and Matariki

— Show notes:

The Big Board at the West Coast IPA Challenge 2012
The Big Board at the West Coast IPA Challenge 2012
Matariki merch, in defiance of trademark nonsense
Matariki merch, defying trademark nonsense
A Cherry Bomb, and many winter coats
A Cherry Bomb, and many winter coats

s02e06: Craft Beer College

— Show notes:

  • (0.30) Interviewees: Steph Coutts and Jonny Day of Craft Beer College. And, full disclosure: long after this sit-down, I actually started working with them as an occasional host of tastings.
  • (1.30) Beer of the Week #1: Emerson’s ‘APA’.
  • (4.40) Amazingly, and brilliantly, the Shoe Museum is actually a thing.
  • (5.40) Beer options.
  • (8.45) Weirdly, an NZQA-accredited course in craft beer has popped up. I’ve yet to form a firm a opinion as to whether or not that’s a good thing.
  • (11.00) Origin stories, as it were.
  • (12.20) “Social excitability” is Steph’s brilliant euphemism for the chemical effect of alcohol (in moderation). I do hope it catches on.
  • (16.55) Seriously, Beastwars rule. In many ways.
  • (22.00) That makes three people with Beer Diaries, at least.
  • (24.00) Volunteering in (many) beer-related contexts. Which you really should do some time, if you haven’t. (And if you have; cheers!)
  • (33.00) Beer of the Week #2: Rodenbach Vintage. Because yay sours.
  • (37.00) My photo did the colour absolutely no justice at all, sadly.
  • (38.40) Huh. There’s Hallertau ‘Funkonnay’, again. How conspicuous.
  • (40.40) My ramble about Lindeman’s ‘Cuvée René’ Gueuze attempts to capture this kind of reaction, wordless and sound-effect-y as it is here.
  • (43.50) The background noise is chocolate being opened. Sorry, we didn’t save you any.
  • (44.50) Craft Beer College, and consumer education — plus the usual (but completely justified!) jabs at the beer-marketing business.
  • (55.50) Recommendations: Yeastie Boys ‘Her Majesty 2012’. It’s possible that I knew the Secret Ingredient at some point, but I have — true to form — lost it. Garage Project ‘Kava Coconut’, which was tonnes of fun — disclosures, disclosures… — at Hashigo’s Pacific Beer Expo. Kereru ‘Moonless Stout’, which really is lovely for a session-strength stout — and should be around a lot more in the latter half of this year, since Chris has a new premises and big shiny steel tanks on the way. Mikkeler ‘Texas Ranger’, a chipotle-and-everything bottle of gorgeousness. And go on, have some Kula Shaker nostalgia.
  • (1.03.00) Seriously, too: Nokabollokov. Good god damn.
  • (1.04.00) Beer of the Week #3, or technically maybe not: Liberty ‘C!tra’. And there’s us talking about Beer of the Year. Which does make me really keen to get the Year In Review up. One more Lost Podcast Archive, then we will…
  • (1.10.10) But first, cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket. Audio editing done in Audacity. Habitual thanks to both. And to Steph and Jonny’s cat.

1: Though, speaking of which, I really should go to town on the Wellington City Council’s astonishingly-loaded questions in their “survey” on alcohol law reform issues. Tactically,that should probably wait until after my application for a Duty Manager’s certificate and the off-license at work both go through. (But when did I ever pay attention to such sensible tactics, I ask you.)
2: Uploaded. Beamed. Podified. Whatever.
3: In all honesty, I’ve forgotten. But it rings a bell.

Actual Diary entries, Rambles and rants

Crafty Beggars

48 Comments
Crafty Beggars bottles
Three Crafty Beggars

It is, apparently, Brandwank Monsoon Season. At least I won’t suffer for material.1 As was spotted by the eagle eye of Dominic (from Hashigo Zake) some months ago in the Trademark Registry, “Crafty Beggars” is a new brand / imprint / stealth-fake-brewery2 from one half of the local duopoly, Lion. And these days, if you’re talking about them, you’re probably talking about Emerson’s,3 not this shit. I haven’t had my say about that bit of news, yet, it’s honestly been too vexing; I’m firmly in the middle on the issue, finding much of the positive and negative feedback to be Missing The Point. But more about that another time, inevitably. Suffice to say — for now — that if you, my dear hypothetical reader, still harboured hopes that Lion’s acquisition of Emerson’s was a sincere and honest investment in craft beer, this should give you pause.

“Someone should make a craft beer you can actually drink”, the bottle’s text declares as the raison d’être of this new range. Nine un-named brewers, going “rogue” from a parent company which also goes un-named, apparently felt that way and set out to make these “crafty, but not too crafty” beers. It’s an act of staggering dickishness and pointless absurdity, a petty swipe at a corner of the industry that Lion a) pretend to also occupy, already, and b) just acquired two large chunks of. The necessary implication is that Mac’s, Little Creatures and Emerson’s are either “not craft” or “not drinkable”. I phoned Lion, to ask which of those two options was now their official stance, and was handed around a little bit but eventually put in touch with their “Brand Manager, Craft” — though I still haven’t been given an answer… If you were a new operation, that tagline would token near-pathological arrogance, but here it’s weirdly worse.

Crafty Beggars blurbs
The Crafty Beggars bottle blurbs

Brandwank is one thing — a vile and detestable thing — but this kind of internally-incoherent brandwank is more annoying by an order of magnitude. How the fuck does no one in the company feel sufficient shame, when one business unit contradicts another, to pull the plug on a campaign like this? As I mentioned when deconstructing some nonsense from the other giant ultra-conglom in the local market, D.B., my favourite example was when Jim Beam was marketed with the slogan “If it ain’t Beam, it ain’t bourbon” and Maker’s Mark was touted by the same company as “the World’s finest bourbon”.4 It just seems so pathetic a trick, such a lazy failure of imagination, and it says nothing good about what they must think of their customers; that kind of half-assed deception seems to require believing them to be stupid or (against all evidence) completely disinterested in where things actually come from.

Last time I had some unkind things to say about a mega-brewery’s fake “little guy” offerings, I drew some criticism for not trying the beer first. Which baffled the hell out of me, since I was explicitly commenting on the marketing. Which is, you know, a separately-existing thing. But in the investigative spirit — which is very close, it turns out, to the morbid curiosity that causes humans to rubberneck on traffic accidents — I grabbed one of each, and I’ve had them here at home tonight.5 And they’re meh — which is me being as unjustifiably generous as it is me being abnormally monosyllabic.

(Meanwhile — in the later spirit of “fuck it, I should empty the Naughty Corner of my fridge while I’m at this” — while I’m writing, I’m polishing off my remaining bottles of those “Resident” beers from Boundary Road / Independent. And I haven’t changed my mind. They are, just as they were, technically competent — vastly moreso than most of the “Boundary” beers — and a recognisable echo of something that might’ve been a good idea before the cost-compromises involved in up-scaling a pilot batch bit hard, and before the beers were filtered to within an inch of their lives and probably robbed of much character. But they sure aren’t good, they sure aren’t special, and they sure as fuck weren’t worth the fuss, the wank and the insults to the local industry that they brought with them.)

Crafty Beggars range
The Crafty Beggars, lined up

Skepticism is just mandatory when three styles of beer appear in a range at precisely the same ABV, especially when that’s an usually-low number. All three “Crafty” beers are 4.0%, which should — given the vagaries of local excise tax rules — raise the suspicion that they’re aiming at a price point, rather than a flavour. I love sessionable beer with an inappropriate passion, but I do ask that the lower strength exist for reasons more to do with the brewer’s designs and the drinker’s plans for their evening, rather than it being dictated by a formula in some arcane spreadsheet. And so, speaking (as I parenthetically was) of the “Resident” beers, these seem to be targeting those, given that Boundary Road placed theirs at a looks-like-a-loss-leader price and proceeded to carve themselves out a sizable chunk of the sales statistics. It looks like Lion have conjured something to claw that back, perhaps after seeing sales of their Mac’s range take a hit. But then why make a drive-by implication that their other “craft” offerings are “undrinkable”? Who the fuck knows? (Also — as an addendum to the “Meanwhile”, above — I’m changing my mind. For their relative lack of flavour and character, these “Resident” beers are camped out on the border of being intolerably bitter.)

The “Crafty” pilsner, ‘Good as Gold’, was worryingly pale and anemic-looking; close to that Budweiser-esque piss-yellow you’d only call “straw gold” if you were being paid wodges of cash to do so. It put me in mind of my ‘Chosen One’ tasting session — but, mercifully, of the non-candidate dummy options like NZ Pure. And if that memory comes as a relief, we’re in dark times indeed. It didn’t stink of faults, sure — none of these beers did — but it just had a limp tinned-apple-flavoured-baby-food nose that definitely wasn’t appealing and sure as hell didn’t convey “pilsner”. ‘Wheat As’ was reassuringly hazy, given how often macro brewers wimp out and apply their ultra-fine nano-scale filters to seemingly everything, and did present some appropriate spice-and-citrus-peel notes. But Belgian-derived witbier-ish stuff hasn’t ever been my thing, so I don’t feel entirely qualified to rule it in or out. Given the two-and-some-bucks-a-bottle price point these seem to be landing at, it’s at least possible that this one represents a bargain — a deal with the inveterate shitbags in the Devil’s marketing division, perhaps, but all the same a bargain. And then the disappointingly un-punny / seemingly un-referential ‘Pale and Interesting’6 commits a devastating act of metaphor shear by pouring like Speight’s and making you realise that these are Speight’s 330ml bottles.7 It’s billed as a “smoother take” on a pale ale, which is always a worrying thing to hear from a mega-brewery, and presents as so watered- and dumbed-down that it — just like its inexcusably-bland cousin from the duopoly’s other half, Monteith’s IPA8 — smells like an empty glass that used to have beer in it, rather than a vessel which currently does. The “tinned fruit” aspect of the nose from the pilsner returned, only this time it was reminiscent of peaches — and even then only if they’d been unceremoniously disposed-of into a cardboard box.

In summary, these aren’t good. They aren’t fuck-awful, hurl-them-at-your-enemies bad, either — but that’s hardly worth praising, is it? Given the pitch, this horrible “craft but drinkable” bullshit they’re swaddled in, they’re an abject failure. They are neither recognisably craft, nor particularly drinkable. Basically every single member of the already-extant Mac’s range — with the possible exception of the new Shady Pale Ale, about which I hear plenty of terrible things — is head-and-shoulders better than these, and well worth the extra dollar.

But wait, what? Back to the pilsner, “Good as Gold”. That’s the name of a beer from the Coromandel Brewing Company, isn’t it? Here we go again, it seems, with the brandwank-engines of the Big Two churning in the absence of a connection to the Almighty Google. I called the design agency responsible for the “Crafty Beggars” work,9 and their Director told me that the beer names were their creation — but Lion obviously have final sign-off on these things, and someone should’ve known / should’ve checked / should’ve given five seconds’ thought to the possibility that someone might’ve found the same reference fitting. But no, here’s one of the Big Boys, charging around making bullshit claims left and right with no consideration of how it affects a) their other products, or b) anyone else’s.

This is why I can’t be optimistic about something like Lion’s acquisition of Emerson’s. These huge, sprawling, many-branded companies — like D.B., Lion and Independent — are shot-through with the wrong thinking, the wrong incentives, too many bad-habit-ed Suits, perverse internal competition, and are the kind of hydra-headed monsters with which it constantly proves impossible to reason. They, at the meta / corporate level, are the “rogues” in this business, and not in the lovable-and-rakish sense; these are proper loose cannons, capable of any damn wreckage, accidental or otherwise.

Diary II entry #248, Crafty Beggars
Diary II entry #248, Crafty Beggars

Verbatim: Crafty Beggars Range — ‘Good as Gold’, ‘Wheat As’, + ‘Pale and Interesting’ 20/11/12 @ home. This is Lion, pulling an epic dick move. Design blogs are all over it, but I just don’t get it. Naff as. All 4%, 330ml — in a Speight’s bottle, in fact. 1) Shockingly pale and clear — and the name was taken, guys… Reminds me of the Chosen One tasting. A can of tinned apple baby food. 2) Actually hazy! Proper adjunct flavours. Not my style, so hard to judge. 3) Looks like Speight’s. Same non-aroma as Monteith’s. Cardboard box, into which tinned pears were dumped.

Crafty beggars caps
Crafty beggars bottlecaps
Monteith's IPA tap badge
Monteith’s IPA tap badge
Monteith's IPA
Monteith’s IPA itself

1: Not that I ever do, of course, grotesquely-far behind in my notes as I am. But after we’re done here, we’re going to have to have words with the newly-appeared “Hancock & Co.” brand. Sheesh.
2: They’re not proud enough to say “a new beer from Lion” or “brewed by Lion”, but also not subtle enough to give the brand its own street address or 0800 number. That middle ground makes no sense.
3: Note for aliens / cave-dwellers / normal people: Lion recently purchased local craft beer legends Emerson’s. The jury is well-and-truly out on whether or not this is a Good Thing.
4: Funnily enough, they also didn’t get back to me when I contacted the parent company and asked them to pick which (if either) was true.
5: As often happens, I’m behind in the Diary in the additional sense of having lots of scraps of paper lying around with notes as-yet-untranscribed into the actual physical book itself. Tonight’s notes were therefore written up, as is common, on the back of a coaster (and photographed for ‘proof’, rather than scanned). Now I almost feel I owe the boys from ParrotDog an apology for soiling their merchandise so.
6: ‘Pale to the Chief’? ‘Pale and Hearty’? Surely there was scope for something. It’s just a bit of a drop off a  thematic cliff after the other two.
7: Maybe they have a whole bunch spare now they’ve started selling Speight’s in “Imperial Pint” bottles, which are inadvisably labelled as such. Local laws which prohibit the use of non-metric measurements might be obsolete and stupid — and indeed they are — but they are still on the books.
8: Just look at the blurb on the tap badge. That should win an award for unjustified overstatement.
9: A very early Alarm Stage on the Brandwank Detector is triggered if, as here, a Google search for a new beer / brewery / brand returns oodles of write-ups of the design work before you can find anyone talking about the actual product. And I know this is largely a matter of unimpeachable aesthetics, but I just don’t see what the praise is about. This design is hugely boring. It’s the spending-money-to-look-poor nonsense of a thousand intolerable Trustafarian fuckheads. Yawn. The same agency’s work on Steinlager Purea is, I’d say, vastly superior in every way.
— a: Though that product’s pitch also falls foul of this same “Crafty Beggars” problem, in that it implies worrying things about the other products from the company, just like Monteith’s Single Source did.

Metablogging, Rambles and rants

Desert Island Beers

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Yeastie Boys 'Gunnamatta' (at Gunnamatta, NSW)
Yeastie Boys ‘Gunnamatta’ (at Gunnamatta, NSW)1

Desert Island Discs is one of those inelimably British British cultural institutions.2 It’s been going since WWII, and is likely responsible for all those brilliant scenes in High Fidelity3 wherein the record shop staff assemble their Top Fives for various (increasingly random) scenarios. The idea is simple: imagine yourself cast-away on a remote but pleasantly habitable island. What records would you wish were there with you? What would you summon to keep you company, if you could? Pausing to take stock of enduring favourites is a genuinely worthy meditative experience — especially with a memory like mine.

Anyway, Desert Island Beers is an ongoing project run in collaboration between the All Gates Brewery’s blog and Real Ale Reviews. Recently, they embarked on a bit of an Australasian Excursion, inviting a bunch of Antipodeans to participate and ponder what they’d want to have with them on their hypothetical island. I was chuffed4 to be asked to join in, and spent an enjoyable evening at the Malthouse, perched on the bar with laptop and beer(s), flicking through my Diary and contemplating my options.

In no particular order — by which I mean to say this isn’t a ranking or a table of medals, this is just the sequence in which I put them on the list — my Desert Island Beers were:

  1. Little Creatures Pale Ale (my Fallout Boy)5
  2. Hallertau ‘Minimus’ (for sessionable loveliness)
  3. Liberty ‘Never Go Back’ (a mandatory B.A.M.F.)
  4. Rochefort 6 / 8 / 10 (a Big Belgian Trappist Thing)
  5. Yeastie Boys ‘Gunnamatta’ Earl Grey IPA (as my “weird”)

My full write-up went up on the All Gates Brewery website over the weekend — my phone beeped and notified me as I arrived at Gunnamatta beach, as featured in the above photo, fittingly enough — and includes elaborated reasons for picking each of the above, as well as my attempts to choose books, an album, a meal, and a luxury item to take in addition to all that lovely beer. It was heaps of fun to participate, and reading around the other entries is a great little window into the personalities of other ‘beer people’ that you might not otherwise hear a lot from; I wholeheartedly recommend you have a wander through their collection and keep and eye out for new local castaways over the next few weeks.

Little Creatures Pale Ale
Little Creatures Pale Ale
Liberty 'Never Go Back'
Liberty ‘Never Go Back’
Rochefort glass
Rochefort glass

1: Which is the wrong Gunnamatta — it’s named for a song which is, in turn, named for a surf beach a thousand kilometers away in Victoria — but the beer-and-beach-matching was gloriously nerdy enough to justify a minor diversion to end my recent (i.e., it finished yesterday) little roadtrip around the NSW South Coast. To compound the matching (and to atone for being in the wrong state, perhaps), we were listening to the song, at least.
2: The Beeb’s website isn’t massively helpful — for slaves-to-copyright reasons — to those of us in further-flung parts of the world. But there’s a rumour, you know, that, apparently, I hear, you can download these things through, um, unofficial channels.
3: In both the book and the film; H.F. is a very-rare instance of a page-to-screen adaptation that works brilliantly well, if you ask me — especially considering that the latter translated the story forward in time and to another continent. The Wikipedia page for the novel — in true fantastically-geeky style — includes the lists, if you’re impatiently curious. 
4: Which felt suitably British.
5: Not, I hasten to emphasise, my Fall Out Boy. The story goes that the band were nameless and called for audience help, whereupon someone suggested the name of Radioactive Man’s sidekick. The band fucked up the spelling / typography, evidently having missed the reference — which, to me, amounts to proof of a deprived upbringing and a possible cause of their relentless crapness.

Tastings and ramblings and whatnot