Subjective ramblings about beer, pubs and associated topics

On the move

I've decided to freshen up the blog a bit, and I found another host for the blog. I have no reason to complain about motime as a service provider, really, but the problems with spam in the comments was probably the deciding factor. It doesn't seem like I'll be able to export any of the contents over there, so I'll leave the old blog as it is for the time being. Maybe I'll have an "old post of the month" theme where I redo old stories - we'll see.

Anyway, I can now be found at http://knutalbert.wordpress.com/.

See you over there - please update your links and bookmarks.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 13:29 | link | comments
beer, brewers

On governments, libertarians and destroyed ingredients

Reason Magazine's Hit and run column has an interesting article about the Greenpeace targeting of Anheuser-Busch:

Greenpeace activists make their livings by scaring the public and so it is never really news when Greenpeacers launch another bogus alarm. This time they are going after beer drinkers.

The article goes quotes an article in the Boston Globe where Greenpeace claims that Budweiser is tainted with an experimental, genetically engineered rice strain, and points out that this rice is in fact approved by the US government.

This is fair and well, more interesting are the comments to the article, which go along two lines:

• Why does a libertarian magazine suddenly go for what regulators have ruled is safe to eat?
• What is rice - GMO or non-GMO - doing in this beer in the first place? A proper beer is not brewed with rice.

To muddle things up totally, a spokesman for the lager lads is quoted in the Globe story that the perfectly legal rice is destroyed during the brewing process:

Doug Muhleman, Anheuser-Busch's vice president of brewing, acknowledged in a prepared statement that US-grown long-grained rice "may have micro levels" of a genetically engineered protein called Liberty Link, but added that the protein is "substantially removed or destroyed" during the brewing of beer sold domestically.

How is that for creating consumer confidence? Zap, it is destoyed! Would you use such a term for how you handle an ingredient in a staple food?

And it opens up a new can of worms when it comes to the beer being exported, doesn't it? Greenpeace Germany are probably celebrating already.

Who said beer journalism is without significance?

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 08:20 | link | comments
beer, brewers, usa

The banning of church ales

A flat tyre on my bike made me take the bus this morning, which meant that I reached the book review section of the 29 September edition of The Economist.  A paragraph in a review of A Little History of the English Country Church by Roy Strong caught my eye:

Yet these upheavals were nothing, Sir Roy claims, in comparison to the puritanical purges of the civil war, during the mid-1600s, which devastated not only the fabric of the church but also the social communion of the congregation. Moreover, the loss of income, particularly from banning the making and selling of church ales, meant that the buildings started to crumble. The book's illustrations show churches stripped bare and others in which the gaudy tombs of the elite have replaced images of saints.

This is way beyond my field of knowledge, but at least I can field an appeal to the more historically minded of my fellow beer bloggers: Who know more about the church ales?

Update:

Martyn Cornell tried to comment of the blog, a function I've shut off because of the high voloume of spam. Well he e-mailed me with the following extract from the first draft of his book  Beer: the Story of the Pint. (Which is on my bookshelf, I hasten to add!):

The rise of beer over ale in the 16th and 17th centuries was matched by the decline in the tradition known as the “ale”. This was a local celebration designed to raise funds for a particular purpose. The longest-lasting was probably the “church-ale”, organised by the churchwardens, when the profit brought in from the brewing and selling of drink, and the consumption of food to go with it, was used for the maintenance of the local church, and for improvements such as a ring of bells or a new loft. Often the “ale” was held in a building called the church-house. Other ales could be for municipal purposes. Lyme in Dorset held regular “cobb ales” in the early 17th century to pay for keeping up the town’s harbour: the one in 1601 raised £20 14s 10d. But the more Puritan-minded Tudor clergy were appalled by church-ales, with one in 1570 claiming they were occasions for “bul-beatings, beare-beatings, bowlings, dycing, cardyng, dauncynges, drunkenness and whoredom.”

Church-ales had actually been largely suppressed under the Protestant Edward VI in the late 1540s, but had sprung back up under his Catholic sister Queen Mary in the 1550s right across the south and west of England. When Mary died and was replaced by another Protestant monarch, Elizabeth, church-ales continued at first in many places, with sometimes spectacular feasts. The “church ale games” for the parish of St Mary in Bungay, Suffolk, in 1566 had a menu that included lamb, veal, honey, eggs, butter, cream, custards, pastries and eight firkins of beer. But from the 1570s, under pressure from Protestant clergy and local magistrates, church-ale celebrations began to disappear from many counties, including all of East Anglia, Kent and Sussex, and to diminish sharply in number elsewhere. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign they were confined mostly to parishes in the West Country and the Thames Valley.

The holding of church-ales was still worrying Somerset’s magistrates in 1633, and sporadic attempts to revive the feasts were suppressed by magistrates in Devon and Sussex during the Interregnum that followed the execution of Charles I in 1649. However, after Charles II’s Restoration in 1660, only one parish in England, Williton in Somerset, seems to have revived the church-ale. It was restarted in 1662, even though the new tax on brewing, which also applied to the Williton churchwardens’ brews, reduced their profits. Takings were declining sharply in the 1680s, and the last blow was the introduction of the Window Tax in 1696, which forced the churchwardens to lease out the church house where the ales were held.

Martyn has an excellent blog - the Zythophile.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 07:09 | link | comments
beer, england, brewing history

What do you do if you want to market a beer without flavour?

You know, the beer where they've taken out the carbohydrates and, with them, the flavour. Foster's of Australia want to reach the image-conscious Australian men attempting to keep their beer bellies in check.

Well, the important thing is to get the punters to think about other things than beer. So a bunch of Slovenian(!) half-naked blondes is what they expect to do the trick.

I don't mind scarcely clad blondes at all, although I would not want them in my beer. But do they (Foster's, not the Slovenians) seriously think that their potential customers for the watered down beer will want to identify with their choice of role model? One thing is how you actually look, another is how you perceive yourself...

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 10:26 | link | comments
australia, beer

AA Gill is dining out again

Yes, I know it's not about beer, but, AA Gill must have the most wicked pen in the British press:

Scottish food is even worse. It has become a self-perpetuating stand-up joke, a game of disgusting combinations and one-upmanship. I was offered a sausage and asked, in a get-you-if-you’re-so-clever sort of way, to guess the mystery ingredient. I failed. If I’d gone through the Larousse Gastronomique from A to Z, I’d have failed. It was Irn-Bru. Someone is making sausages with too much rusk and Irn-Bru. Why? Do you think we’re falling short of our E numbers?

Wait, there is more:

Harcourt Street is a dead corner of the northern West End. The restaurant is a tiny terraced house, opposite the Swedish church. I had no idea there was a Swedish church in London – I imagine it’s all blond wood and stainless steel inside, and you can get flat-pack pews and absolution for absolutely everything.

The front room of the restaurant is taken up with a fish bar and a single resentful cook working his organic origami with a stubborn, precise slowness. Because there were five of us, we were led to the basement, to what had once been the coal hole. It was white and lit with the sort of neon that could induce migraine in the blind. The chairs were unsustainable for anyone who owns their own legs or a coccyx attached to a nervous system. It was a space for eating, designed and serviced by people who knew they would never have to sit and eat there. The whole restaurant made it as difficult as possible for customers to get things into their mouth.

The rest is over at the Sunday Times. Enjoy!

The photo has nothing to do with the rest, it is solely there for decorative purposes.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 09:04 | link | comments
england, sweden, scotland

Glasses from bottles

An unusual gift box at the Natural History Museum in London - wine goblets made from beer bottles, where they have just heated and reshaped them, saving a lot of energy in the process. Of course you could use similar glasses for beer, too. I would not go for Corona bottles, though, but which  other breweries have nice bottles that could be used? Grolsch comes to mind, and I think I've had a few English barley wines with the label integrated in the bottle, too. Other suggestions?

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 13:39 | link | comments
beer, england

Don't try this at home!

From our Cambodia correspondent:

A Cambodian man who took off his trousers, tied the legs at the bottom and wrangled a 2-metre cobra into them died when it bit him through the fabric, local media reported Monday.

Khmer-language daily Koh Santepheap quoted police as saying Chab Kear, 36, saw the reptile swimming in a river just outside the capital last Thursday during a drinking session and captured it in the hopes of selling it later in the day.

He tied the animal inside his trousers and a scarf around his waist, but as he continued carousing the enraged snake managed to get its fangs free and bite Kear three times on the stomach.

The newspaper reported Kear's last words as being "don't worry - it's nothing a drink can't fix" before he succumbed to the cobra's venom.

I am afraid we will see more of this closer to home with all the smokers being forced to  do their drinking outdoors across Europe as smoking is banned in country after country.  Watch out for the reptiles tonight!

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 12:51 | link | comments

Norwegian beer aid

The Christmas beer from Norwegian star brewery Nøgne ø will be avaiable on cask this year, 200 casks to be exact. No, not in Norway, where the market is not yet ripe for this kind of venture, but in neighbouring Finland. Head brewer Kjetil Jikiun was invited by the Finnish micro Plevna to come over and brew the beer for them. The beer will be available in selected pubs and restaurants in Finland from December 1.

Plevna has a good reputation in the domestic market, having won two gold awards at this year's Helsinki beer festival. Nøgne ø is already well established in Finland, 5 of their beers are available in the government monopoly Alko stores, and they seem to sell well. For a Norwegian, it is a bit annoying that the Finnish tax regime makes the beers far cheaper than in Norway!

In the picture:  Head brewer Kjetil Jikiun, Nøgne Ø (right) and head brewer Sam Vitanemi, Plevna

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 10:46 | link | comments
beer, norway, nøgne ø, finland

I am back! (plus something to read while you are waiting)

I've been in London for almost a week, so I haven't been updating here. I was with my family, so my pub crawling was very limited, but I'll write up some thoughts and observations over the next few days. I'll have to upload some photos as well. Meanwhile, David has recommended an article in the New York Times on beer tourism in Maine. Looks good!

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 11:13 | link | comments
beer, england, usa