Rambles and rants

Just a phase ― on haze’s murky history, and crazes in general

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'Solace in the Wind' on the Wellington Waterfront (20 February, 2014)
And if you gaze long into the haze, the haze also gazes into you…

This piece first appeared in the August 2017 edition of SOBA’s magazine, The Pursuit of Hoppiness ― a thing which has evolved a lot recently and spawned a nicely-maintained online incarnation, among other improvements. I’ve seen that version of this post handed around a bit already, but I wanted to also share it here (as I have done with other pieces). Overtly hazy beers remain a hot-button topic (as you may already have noticed), but I think the whole thing is most useful as a microcosm for how we think about history and fashion and matters of taste overall…

As I sit down to write this, I’m finishing off a glass of some newfangled hazy beer from an “independent” brewery not far from here. It’s distinctly murky, which blunts its otherwise-lovely golden colour but it’s got a nice amount of flavour without too much bitterness. I could see myself getting used to it. “Sparkling Ale”, they call it. From a Coopers Brewery in Adelaide, founded as recently as 1862! That’s basically just yesterday, given that we humans have been making beer for some 7,0001 years…

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Mediawatch

‘Too Much…’ is never enough

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Author (probably) not pictured. (Taken from here.)

So. A wild satirist appeared, and is proving super effective. We haven’t really had one around here before, and I don’t know what good deeds we did to deserve Too Much To Beer as our first. It’s entertaining and incisive stuff, doing what all the best satire strives to do when it gets up in the morning: highlighting absurd truths and using humour to make a point worth making. As of right now, its creator is still anonymous and ― despite being a naturally inquisitive sort ― I’d like them to stay that way.

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From the front line

“A bar is just a church where they serve beer…”

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The tradition red-neon sign at Golding's
A good sign

The “beer community” is frequently celebrated as a special thing and one of the reasons this is a rewarding hobby to have, and a nice industry to work in. And that, broadly speaking,1 is right and true. But since switching back to bartending I’ve been struck more and more by the distinct — although obviously overlapping — nature of bar culture and the nice ways that a good one can have a community all of its own. The title here comes from an excellent Jim White song2 that gets stuck in my head whenever I’m pondering this and marvelling at the myriad ways that people use the bar to share little moments of celebration or of solidarity or anything in between, including weirdly heartwarming mundanity — and: beer.

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Mediawatch

Fresh hypocrisy

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Hops at the Baxendale family estate, Golden Bay (March 2016)
So fresh*

Last week saw a nicely-timed bit of beer journalism: just as us New Zealanders were settling down to enjoy this year’s batch of green-hopped1 beers — served within days of their release — a flurry kicked off online about the dodgy practice of some U.S. breweries putting longer “best before” lifespans on beers they send to Australia than what they are labeled with back home. So a can of, say, Stone’s Go To IPA will have a much-hyped 120-day ‘expiry’ in California, but get given a whole year on the shelf in Canberra. It’s a saga worth reading through, if you haven’t already, and perfectly illustrates a nice little point of moral philosophy2 — that hypocrisy is a special kind of dickishness.

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Diary entries

Anything-but-Guinness Day, 2017

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Garage Project 'Aro Noir' at Shepherd (17 March 2017)
Aro Nitro

It’s been a while since I’ve had the usual pint on Saint Patrick’s Day. Aside from a general indifference to tradition and a specific aversion to the way that holiday’s been borrowed and bastardised and bent into an excuse for problematic daydrinking — I’ve also got a particular gripe against Guinness for so completely overshadowing the way so many people think about dark beer or anything on Nitro, let alone both.

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Mediawatch, Rambles and rants

The Brewers Association’s new disinformation campaign

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The truth is a brittle thing (from a threadless.com design by macdoodle)
The truth is a brittle thing (adapted from a threadless.com design by macdoodle)

More information always seems like a worthy idea. But the truth is a complicated thing and some people are very skilled bullshitters — able to spin a rare species of lie from saying something entirely accurate, which carefully exploits ambiguities in someone’s question or levers off errors in their background understanding. ‘Beer the Beautiful Truth’, a new campaign launched by the Brewers Assocation,1 is sadly just this kind of bullshit. It’s the opposite of what beer needs right now.

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Location notes

Trains, Rains, and Brewday ’17

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Garage Project 'Rhubarb Rhubarb Rhubarb' in a puddle at Brewday 2017
A half pint in a shallow puddle — and yes, I do get Looks when I take these photos

This time last year, I was recounting three years’ of Brewday experiences over the hill in Martinborough, as I missed out on the festival’s fourth incarnation. This time last week,1 I was on a train to Upper Hutt — the event’s original organisers had sold it, and it’d been relocated there for this year (and, all going well, onwards). The move brought some skepticism, including from myself, but I went exploring2 and am happy to report that the transplant seems a success and the prognosis looks good.

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Podcast episodes

Will It Gaff..?

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Continuing in the strange experimental spirit we started with our ‘Will It Shandy..?’ investigation, Dylan ― of The Bottleneck blog, and my comrade / direct superior at Golding’s Free Dive ― and I ask the yet-more-nonsensical question: Will It Gaff? We realise that’s probably not really a noun, nevermind a verb,1 but we wanted to pick up the thread of mostly-forgotten ginger-beer-blends (with names like “portergaff” and “shandygaff”) that we mentioned in passing last time. For this round, we enlisted Annika Naschitzki ― of Tiamana Brewery, and herself an occasional blogger, who handily hails from a different (and definitely livelier)2 beer-blending culture.

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Going meta

2016: By the numbers

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Peaks and troughs
A suitably-erratic depiction of the year

After an introspective and intentionally unstudied look back on 2016, I thought it might be nice to balance things out with some data. I use Untappd to log my beer-drinking, as another aid against my shoddy memory ― though there’s always the problem of needing to remember to use your memory-aid1 ― and being a paid-up supporter lets me dump out the year’s check-ins,2 and tinker with a spreadsheet and see what patterns emerge.

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Rambles and rants

Boycotts in Boomtime

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The header from my Pursuit of Hoppiness piece (Summer 2016, p60)
Author not pictured

This piece originally appeared in the summer edition of SOBA’s magazine, The Pursuit of Hoppiness. A few recent discussions1 of whether (and how) we should more-openly mix our politics and our pitching or purchasing have reminded me to belatedly post it here.

Introducing himself and his mission, Michael Jackson (the drinks writer, not the other one — as the inevitable caveat goes) often said “I want you to think about every beer you put to your lips”. He definitely didn’t just mean taste; he always talked about history, and context, and companionship. But my suspicion is that he wouldn’t have stopped there, and I submit we should add ethics to the list: sometimes, the behaviour of the people who make or sell a beer is reason enough to avoid it entirely. I’m even fairly agnostic about the details. I just want to see more people drawing a line somewhere.

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Tastings and ramblings and whatnot