Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

Here’s all the writing around beer, breweries and pubs that struck us as important or interesting in the past week, from breweries under scrutiny to pub life in Gateshead.

Undoubtedly the biggest story of the week was the open letter from former BrewDog employees to the Scottish brewery’s management, criticising its “culture of fear”. Eloquently expressed, calmly indignant and signed by more than a hundred individuals, it prompted a series of responses from BrewDog – clumsy, at first, then sinister (an invitation to current staff to sign a counter-letter) until a careful party line coalesced. The story went viral appearing on the BBC, Guardian and CNN, not to mention across the trade press. The story trended on Twitter in the UK for around 24 hours. Punks With Purpose, the campaign group, responded with a second open letter, refusing to let up the pressure. Martin Dickie, co-founder of BrewDog, issued his own separate statement via Instagram.

This story has its own momentum and it doesn’t feel to us that there’s much to be added by commentary from the sidelines, especially of the popcorn.gif variety. This shouldn’t be about gloating, entertainment or vindication – that original letter is what matters. We’ve all had bosses we didn’t like or worked at companies that were imperfect but how many of us have ever felt moved to band together with a hundred former colleagues to demand change?

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At Brussels Beer City, Eoghan Walsh treats us to a long piece on the difficult birth of a new museum of Belgian beer:

Fear of corporate dominance was just one of the criticisms Belgian Beer World received following the July 2015 announcement. The activists who had strong-armed the city government into pedestrianising the central boulevards were turning their attention to what this new public space would look like, and who it would be for… Soon posters began appearing in windows decrying a “Disneyfication” of Brussels caused by a city administration as more interested in catering to tourists than the needs of local residents. In Belgian Beer World they saw the corporate privatisation of what was nominally a public space. The entrance steps to the Bourse were long used as a rallying point for protests, for the celebration of sporting triumphs, and in 2016 – in the wake of the Brussels terror attacks – as a spontaneous memorial. Public intellectuals like Lieven Van Cauter feared the building would abandon this civic role in its new guise, saying it was a project to make you vomit.

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At Russia Beyond (hmm…) Anna Sorokina tells the story of the Soviet beer Zhigulevskoye, brewed in numerous places, to different recipes – a brand that became a style:

The shop and bar at the Zhigulevsky brewery in the city of Samara on the Volga River is always busy. At any given time, customers are enjoying a few beers, either inside or near the takeaway window outside, or they are milling around waiting for a fresh batch of their favorite brew to be served. The beer is delivered to the store via an underground pipe, and locals say that it is far superior to what is available in shops elsewhere since proper Zhigulevskoye beer cannot be stored for more than a couple of days… Despite a long queue, customers at the brewery shop are served quickly. Each customer eagerly removes the top from an empty bottle they have brought with them and hands it over to the shop assistant, who fills it with beer from a hose. The customer then quickly replaces the top before the foam begins to rise, and the shop assistant is already serving the next customer.

(Via @kmflett.)

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Andreas Krennmair bought an old stone beer mug from one of his favourite breweries but was puzzled by the specific brand name printed on it. As any normal person would, he immediately embarked on several days’ worth of research to work out when it was manufactured:

The earliest person named Franz Köllerer that I was able to identify was Franz Seraphim Köllerer, born on Sept 14, 1839 in Schönram. The Köllerer family must have been reasonably wealthy, as Franz was able to attend grammar school in nearby Salzburg… Another sign of Franz Köllerer’s wealth is how well-travelled he was. Not only can his name be found in public records that he stayed in Salzburg, Linz and Graz several times during the 1860s and 1870s, a book titled Deutscher Parlaments-Almanach (German Parliament Almanac) credited him with having travelled abroad to Hungary, the principalities along the river Danube, Turkey, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Greece and Italy… “Why would he be mentioned in such a book?”, you wonder. Very simple: because he got elected as Member of Parliament to the German Reichstag in Berlin in 1874, for the district of Rosenheim, a role in which he served until he stepped down in 1877. According to Salzburger Chronik in 1874, he was “not a studied man” but a well-known man with a “healthy heart and mind from the midst of the German people”.

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Jess has been reading How Bad Are Bananas? – the carbon footprint of everything by Mike Berners-Lee and so we were interested to see a pair of posts (one | two) on sustainability in beer by Kelsey Picard at Science Made Beerable:

Brewing is a very water and energy-intensive process. On average, the entire production process of brewing will consume 60 kWh for every 100 litres of beer produced, which can be regarded as a significant contributor of greenhouse gases… Water is used in every step of the brewing process, but only a small amount actually makes it into the final product. Inside the average brewhouse, it takes 8L of water to produce 1L of beer. At less efficient breweries, the ratio can go as high as 13L to one. Cleaning uses the most water; 4-10L per L of beer, and additional water is needed for cooling and packaging. Much of the water used in breweries is lost to evaporation or is simply sent down the drain… Where breweries are sourcing their water, how much they are using and what they do with it after makes a big difference to the sustainability of a beer. Australian craft breweries are increasingly installing water meters at various sections of the operation to reduce water consumption during the beer production process as well as recovering water throughout the brewing process to be used in cleaning processes that do not require high quality water… This 8L of water per 1L beer usage doesn’t account for the irrigation and chitting of the barley or growing hops. 

You’ll notice a mention of BrewDog in there which has sparked a thought in our minds about how much easier it might be for consumers to assess a brewery’s green credentials than some vague notion of its decency.

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For Esquire, would you believe, Chris Stokel-Walker has written about a community rallying round to keep The Three Tuns in Gateshead afloat and what it might say about the fate of pubs in a post-pandemic world:

The road is almost at an end – hopefully. The Three Tuns reopened outdoors on 12 April, like many pubs able to carve out an outdoor seating area. The regulars who remained – those not carried away by old age and loneliness – pulled together to help Smith. Some of the lads who most devotedly propped up its bar of an evening converted old barrels into seating… “It was just hands-on to make sure it could reopen again, because it is important to people,” says [Lauren] Tierney on a glorious summer evening a week after it reopened. That night was the first time Tierney and [partner Steve] Parnell would take a night off from visiting the Three Tuns since it opened. After a long period of closure and lost money, the pair wanted to ensure the pub’s landlord felt justified in reopening – and who could blame them? “It’s that novelty of being able to go back out again,” says Tierney. “A lot of the people I see in the pub I’ll only see in the pub,” says Parnell, who is godfather to a fellow drinker’s children, and was best man at another’s wedding. “You get very close, then it all shuts down, and you never see each other for months.”

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Finally, from YouTube, new-to-us archive footage of a prefab post-war pub being thrown into existence.

For more good reading check out Alan McLeod’s round-up from Thursday.

Here’s the writing about beer culture and pubs from the past week that grabbed our attention, from rampant egotism to the value of cask ale.

The conversation about sexism, harassment and bullying in beer has continued. Charlotte Cook’s piece for Ferment, the promo mag for a beer subscription service, is a must-read, combining righteous anger (based on personal experience) with precise criticism:

Greg Koch of Stone is often humorously called ‘The Beer Jesus’, but there are plenty of brewery owners out there who would take that at face value. These companies are not run as businesses but as theocracies, where the Good Book is in fact the proclamations on Twitter of the brewery owner – and the disciples are those who have invested in whatever crowdfunding scheme they have shilled… I strongly feel that this is the root of the problem with misogyny in beer. The ego trip that takes place when someone tells you that you’re incredible and make the best beer in the world can easily drive people to act in ways that they wouldn’t normally, and as the praise keeps pouring in, so does the need for the serotonin hit that it provides. This also leaches out into the wider company culture and explains how these abuses can be enabled without repercussions from within.

Meanwhile, Jan Rogers, the managing director of Marble Brewery has announced that she is stepping down in the wake of accusations of a toxic working environment. That she also mentions having considered suicide underlines why, in our view, it’s important to avoid so-called pile-ons, if possible. Equally, the conversations still need to be had – and telling people who feel they’ve been abused or mistreated to ‘calm down’ won’t cut it either.

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For Pellicle, David Jesudason has written about ‘desi pubs’ – pubs in England run by British Asians. From his own experiences of racism in pubs as a young man to a focus on the story of a specific pub in South London, it’s a fascinating read, sometimes grim, often hopeful:

I was hoping my first visit to a pub would be a rite of passage… Aged just fifteen, I felt more anxious about being the lone brown face in a white environment than I was about being served my first pint. Opening the door, an old man at the bar shouted: “Anyone order a mini-cab?”… The town I lived in, Dunstable which borders Luton in Bedfordshire, had very few Asians like me in it—apart from, guess what? Nothing could have prepared me for the humiliating laughter that broke out after being mocked for daring to enter their world… It didn’t stop me from having my first ever pub pint that evening (Wadworth 6X) and it hasn’t dimmed my love for pubs in the intervening 20 years. Moving to a more diverse area helped, but even then there were many establishments that I didn’t feel comfortable in… I found my confidence by visiting so-called desi pubs, where I was served by other British-Asians keen to make these spaces their own.

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Roger Protz has been writing about beer for, oh, a couple of years now, and it’s a memory of a marketing campaign of 30-odd years ago that brings his latest piece to life for us. It’s a call to action for the industry, arguing that to boost cask ale, it needs to be treated with some reverence:

I recall some years ago, when Whitbread was still involved in brewing, that it produced an oyster stout and placed small booklets on pub tables describing the history of the style and the way it’s made… When I sat in the Blacksmiths Arms in St Albans supping this delicious beer and reading the booklet, I noticed that many other customers were doing the same. They not only had a fine drinking experience but had also learned a little about the history and heritage of British brewing… We should build on that experience. We should encourage brewers to top their pump clips on beer handles with the simple message ‘Great British Beer – our heritage’. This should be backed by booklets with explanations about the myriad beer styles in the cask sector – mild, bitter, IPA, barley wine, stout, porter, golden ale and many more.

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For Good Beer Hunting, Lucy Corne has written about a “startup hop farm” in the unlikely location of downtown Johannesburg, South Africa:

Originally constructed as a fort, Constitution Hill in Johannesburg is best known as a prison—both Nelson and Winnie Mandela were incarcerated here during the apartheid years. Today, the low-rise, red-roofed complex is a museum, made up of the 19th-century fort; the Women’s Jail, with its castle-like facade; and the stark cells known as Number Four, where Black male inmates were held… Away from the main building sits the car park, a near-empty garage with nothing to single it out but a gently snoozing security guard and a dark doorway tucked away in a shaded corner. That door leads to a rickety staircase that climbs upwards. Here, on the roof, Maloney meticulously tends downtown Johannesburg’s first hop farm. 

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You might or might not make it through the paywall to read this piece – we find the Financial Times quite erratic in that regard. At any rate, it’s an interesting piece by Judith Evans and Alice Hancock about the business end of British brewing in these strange times:

Most [breweries] been supported by UK government loans and support schemes, but operators fear that as that tapers out, small brewers could face tough decisions on the viability of their businesses… The number of UK breweries declined in 2020 for the first time in 18 years, after more than doubling in size in the previous decade to 1,823, according to data from the Campaign for Real Ale… Some have spied an opportunity. Luke Johnson, an investor in hospitality businesses including Patisserie Valerie and Gail’s, completed a £5m deal this month to buy Curious Brewery, a brewer run by the English vineyard Chapel Down, out of administration… Johnson plans to create “an alliance of beers” that could be brewed through the Curious facility. “We will pursue a buy-and-build strategy . . . In the coming 12 months there will be quite a few craft beer brands that need recapitalising and we have the resources to do that,” Johnson said.

That sounds… Is ominous too loaded a word?

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We’ve put this at the end because, ugh, it’s all a bit miserable. With the COVID-19 stats currently having a wobble the proposed end to COVID-19 restrictions in England on 21 June is looking less likely. That means pubs might have to continue trading with controls and restrictions in place. One the one hand, we feel their pain – it’s hard work to administer, more difficult to make a profit and compromises the experience for drinkers. At the same time, there has been a slew of outbreaks and hot-spots connected to pubs, including this notable example in Leek. All anyone can do, we suppose, is try to follow the rules and support pubs in whichever way they feel comfortable. For our part, that means sticking to outside, for a little while more at least; and being as little nuisance as possible to hot, stressed, masked-up staff.

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On a more cheerful note, check out the replies to this Tweet for some enthusiastic recommendations:

To enliven my day and get me thinking about something fun and happy, tell me about recent discoveries you’ve made and what you’ve been drinking lately. For instance, I’ve discovered that hazy pales, a stealth style, have really been delivering the goods lately.

What about you?

— Jeff Alworth (@Beervana) June 3, 2021

And for more good reading check out Alan McLeod’s round-up from Thursday.