Author: PeteBrown

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What’s on YOUR pub juke box?

No it’s not.  Mine is.

I’ve been really busy, and then I’ve been away on holiday, drinking vast quantities of Estrella and Cruzcampo (and an accidental awful pint of Fosters) which means I missed the publication in the Morning Advertiser of My Pub Jukebox.

I get drawn to this column each week, like an itchy scab.  Every week, without fail, sales reps from brewers and pub equipment suppliers, and middle managers from pubcos, choose tracks by Queen, Bryan Adams, Michael Jackson, Chris Rea and Chris de Burgh.  I swear someone once even chose a track by the vile, unspeakable M*ka.

And every time I read it a bit of me dies a little inside.

Yes, I’m a music snob.  Far more than I’m a beer snob.  If I was as snobby about beer as I am about music, you would not be reading this blog.  You’d be trying to find my address so you could come round and punch me in the face.

So I abused my position and demanded the chance to do my own pub jukebox.  They said yes.  Sadly, it’s not a feature that merits inclusion on the MA’s website, so I can’t give a link to it.  But if you don’t have a copy of the MA dated 23 September, here’s my selection below.

If you like, you can debate it, and suggest your own track listing.  It won’t be as good as mine though.  Just live with that.

Pete Brown’s Pub Juke Box

“Long before I was a beer snob I was a music snob: a terrible, obnoxious snob who delighted in stuff other people had never heard of, or found unlistenable. Having said that, at least eight of these ten would liven up a night down the boozer.  Just accept that my music collection is better than yours, and we’ll get along fine…

1. New Order – Temptation

The soundtrack to my life – simple as that.  It’s been played at every meaningful event I’ve ever experienced; the sound of a band intoxicated by the realization of how good they might – and almost did – become.

2. Roland Alphonso – Phoenix City

I found this by accident on a Trojan Records compilation and it’s been my party starter ever since.  Why it’s not a staple cover of every ska band on the planet I’ll never know.

3. The Clash – Straight to Hell

If a pub has a jukebox that doesn’t have at least one Clash CD, I won’t drink in there.  It’s a litmus test.  Music but no Clash means the landlord doesn’t know what he’s doing, so the beer’s probably going to be rubbish too.

4. Arcade Fire – Wake Up!

“WHOOOOAA-OH! WHOOOOAA-OOH-OOH-OOOOOOOH-OH!  WHOOOAAA-OH-OH-OOOOOH-OH! WHOOA-OH-OH-OH-Ooooh.” I think that says it all, really.

5. Orange Juice – Consolation Prize

“I’ll never be man enough for you”.  A geek’s rant raised to something noble and majestic by one of the most inspirational men singing today – mainly because it’s a bona fide miracle that he still is – Mr Edwyn Collins.

6. The Blue Nile – Tinseltown in the Rain

Their albums come along less frequently than Halley’s comet, but that’s because perfection takes a long time. Songs of neon, traffic, bitter coffee and rain – the soul of the city, written as epic by the singer’s singer.

7. Godspeed You Black Emperor! – The Dead Flag Blues (intro)

From a genre known as ‘post rock’, the bleakest song ever written.  So dark it’s actually funny: “The sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides.  And a dark wind blows.  The government is corrupt.  And we’re so many drunks with the radio on and the curtains drawn.” I’m just showing off now.

8. Guillemots – Sao Paulo

While stuck on a container ship en route to India with a barrel of traditional IPA for my book Hops and Glory, I went a bit mad.  This wildly inventive group’s 11-minute caterwauling, multi-dimensional masterpiece was the only thing barmy enough to make me feel a sense of equilibrium with the world.

9. Elbow – One Day Like This

“Throw those curtains wide. One day like this a year would see me right.” Pubs used to play the national anthem at closing time. Now they should play this – by law – for a mass sing-a-long just before last orders. Talking of which…

10. Richard Hawley – Last Orders

From a man who lives in the pub, whose music is the pub, a melancholy piano solo to soundtrack a sleepy walk home after a night well-lived.”

My favourite REAL pub juke box is at the Shakespeare in Stoke Newington, London N16. It’s almost as achingly hip as my selection, and has the added bonus that it exists.

If you want a more crowd-pleasing version, the Beer Widow has already posted her response.

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The Two Peters venture into the world of video blogging

Peter Amor is a very nice man.  25 years ago he set up the Wye Valley Brewery, which brews some very nice beers indeed.  Earler this year, once the silver jubilee celebrations had died down, he decided he wanted to give something back to the industry he´d built his livelihood on.  He wanted to do something to help celebrate British beer.

Ian Hudson, a former brewery employee, had by this time set up a film production conmpany.  So Ian and Peter started talking, then contacted me with a view to making some kind of film that sang the praises of British beer.

After kicking a few ideas around, we decided to start off by making a series of video blogs.  Once a month, we will be filming in a particular region of the UK, to produce monthly pairs of blogs.  I believe (though I may be wrong) that these represent a bit of a depatrture for V-Blogging in that they´re made with a full film crew and hopefully therefore have a veneer of professionalism to them. 

They´re not necessarily aimed at a beer geek audience but at a more general public, and we´re exploring ways to give them a wider reach in an age where TV channels won´t commission many serious content about beer.  So if you´re a fellow beer blogger and you´re thinking ´this is rally basic stuff´ – fine, but it´s not basic to most people.  The featured beers will be limited to cask ales, because that´s what Peter´s passionate about and he´s paying the bills.  But in today´s brewing scene, limiting it to cask is hardly a hardship.     

My bit is easy.  I have to select a few beers from that region, drink them, and talk about them on camera.  We decided to do the first one from Nottingham, home of the 2010 Champion Beer of Britain, Harvest Pale.  Here are the results.  Apart from convincing me of the urgent need for a diet, I´m quite pleased. 


Pete Brown’s British Beer Blog from Ian Hudson Films on Vimeo.

Mr Amor has a harder task.  He has to explain the history and production of beer, the ingredients and the process. Here´s his first one.


Peter Amor’s British Brewing Blog from Ian Hudson Films on Vimeo.

We´re quite pleased with the results for a first go.  Next month we´re in Wales.  If you think we should come and see you, let me know!

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The Cask Report

Have spent most of the day in a radio studio doing syndicated interviews about the Cask Report, which we’re launching today.  This means the Report, which I was hoping to put up here as an exclusive here earlier today, has already been picked up by several bloggers which, along with some favourable national media coverage, is great stuff.
Regular readers of this blog will know I’m hardly a cask ale purist.  I regularly criticize people who are.  But cask ale is the most misunderstood of beers.  And it was cask ale brewers who got together and decided we needed an industry report on their part of the beer market.  I’m proud to write the report each year, and to be a spokesperson for cask ale when the report comes out. 
This year’s report contains great news for cask ale brewers and pubs that sell it.  In fact, it’s the best news we’ve had in the four years I’ve been doing the report: 
  • 5% value growth versus 2% value decline for beer overall.
  • Volume steady versus 4% volume decline for beer overall – the first time since 1994 that cask volume hasn’t fallen.
  • 120,000 new drinkers taking total cask drinkers to 8.6 million
  • 4% increase in distribution, with 3000 new pubs stocking cask
  • Average age of the cask drinker is getting younger – 17% increase in 18-24 year-old drinkers.

This in an amazing performance given the general state of pubs and the collapse of volume in the beer market as a whole.
But despite the fact that many people simplify this good news into “cask is growing”, actually it’s not.  Cask’s fantastic performance is great news for drinkers, but good as it is, it’s still only static in volume terms.  That’s because most cask ale drinkers only drink it infrequently, and average throughput of cask ale (in line with beer generally) is down 5 per cent.  
I have a tiny worry that in spreading the good news about cask, we might make drinkers, brewers and pubs complacent, that all you need to do is stick a few handpulls on the bar and everything will be sorted.  
It doesn’t work like that.
In the beer world, we spend time with other like-minded people.  The brewers and publicans I speak to are all doing really well, but that’s because they work hard developing beers, keeping them in great condition, and telling people how good they are.  It doesn’t happen automatically.  46% of the UK population have still never tried cask ale.  Only 18% of drinkers claim to drink it on a regular basis.  People still don’t know that much about it.  
It’s important that anyone who loves cask ale who reads the report (downloadable here in full) reads the warnings as well as the fantastic news on cask’s resurgence.
Look, I just do as I’m told.

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Plzen: Built on Beer

OK so the live blogging experiment was only partially successful (what can I say? I had a cold).  But here, better late than never, is another post from our recent beer bloggers’ Czech trip.
In retrospect, some places seem fated to become what they are, drawn hopelessly to their destiny.  I thought I knew the story of Plzen, but as with so many stories, the narrative is geological.  Sometimes I’m a historian, but sometimes you have to be an archaeologist: if you gently scrape away the story on the surface, you find another one beneath, and maybe even one below that.
Wonder if this is where my publisher got the idea for the horrid old cover of Man Walks into a Pub from?
Plzen (places in the Czech Republic have both German and Czech names, and when you’re there it starts to feel appropriate to use the Czech spelling) is synonymous with beer, and with the date 1842, when Josef Groll allegedly brewed the first golden lager, the style which eventually became known as Pilsner.  That’s bollocks of course – there was golden lager before Groll – but there’s no denying the astonishing impact his intervention had on the beer world.
Legend has it that the circumstances leading up to Groll’s appointment saw the quality of the town’s beer deteriorate so badly that it was ceremonially poured down the drain in front of the town hall.  Prior to this, the people of Plzen had had the right to brew themselves – a privilege not given lightly.  After the ceremonial dumping of the beer, the city formed a burghers brewery, a collective venture that employed Groll and made history.
The clues to the layer beneath are there for all to see in that story.  Why was beer so important to the citizens of Plzen?  Why did they all have brewing rights?
And so you come back to fate and destiny.
Plzen lies in rolling, tree-lined Bohemian countryside.  Naked, in the thirteenth century, it would have been one of those locations that screamed “Build on me!”, especially if you were looking to build a gaff that could be easily defended during centuries of almost constant warfare.  Amid a confluence of rivers, stands a gentle, dome shaped hill.  Town square on top of the hill, a cathedral in the middle of that with a 100-metre-high tower for observation, nice grid system of streets, a network of walls and moats at the bottom of the hill, and you’ve got a town that withstood fairly regular assault until 1618 and the opening exchanges of the Thirty Years War.
Why is this relevant to beer?  Because that gentle hill is made of sandstone, easily excavated.  And as soon as the town was granted its charter in 1295, the citizens began to dig.  First cellars, then tunnels joining them up, and soon there was a 19km underground network inside the hill.   
And according to the tour guide (not always reliable, but in this case very plausible), the initial reason for digging was storage for beer – in other words, lagering.  All burghers had brewing rights, and it seems many used them.  It backs up what Protzy has discovered talking to historic German breweries, that lagering goes back much longer than we thought.  In the labyrinth beneath Plzen, there are even underground bars and restaurants, where people who brewed better beer than their neighbours sold it to them though holes in their cellar walls.
You can now go on a tour of the ‘Plzen historic underground’ starting at the town’s brewery museum.  Thankfully the old man in Czech trousers who greets your hangover with traditional songs played on an accordion remains on the surface, and a sexy-librarian type tour guide issues hard hats (this is not just health and safety gone mad – you will smack your head) and guides you through 800 metres of tunnels and caves.
The sound of running water is constant.  There are about 360 wells down here, providing the famous soft water that’s so important to Pilsner beer.  The natural temperature is around five degrees Celsius.  Among the many museum pieces are drinking vessels from down the centuries.  Tin steins from the fifteenth century look pretty similar to anything you see in souvenir shops today.
OK, the table’s from IKEA, but the tankard is over four centuries old.
All these factors – along with the treasured Saaz hops grown nearby – come together to make brewing great beer seem inevitable.  Beer came to the Czech Republic with its first inhabitants – evidence of brewing and drinking has been found in the dwellings of early Teutons, Slavs and Celts, and by AD 922 the newly consecrated Bishop Vojtech was complaining about the scale of brewing in Brevnov monastery in Prague. 
So Plzen was a hugely significant brewing city before Groll came along.  In fact, that’s why they hired him – it was inconceivable that the city should have substandard beer after such a long brewing history.  Plzen literally stands on its brewing heritage.  The question is, what really happened to make such dramatic intervention necessary?  Why did the burghers pool their collective brewing rights?  Did the beer really deteriorate so badly it had to be poured away, or was the move simply a less dramatic reaction to the Industrial Revolution, an acknowledgement that brewing needed to happen on a bigger scale?
I don’t know, but in Plzen, nobody is saying anything to spoil the legend.

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Chodovar and the Bohemia/Bavaria beer nation

So after the future comes the past.

An hour or so on a minibus from Prague to Plzen, delayed by Tierney-Jones’ alarm not going off.  Bags dropped in a charming pension in town, then back on the minibus and out along motorways through forests and fields towards Chodovar.
There’s a big hotel, a brewery behind it, and as we drive around the back of this complex, the entrance to a tunnel.

You wouldn’t believe what’s inside this cave entrance…

Inside is a vast labyrinth of caves hewn from granite over a period of six centuries.  Now there’s a restaurant at the heart of it, busy on a Friday lunchtime with families, couples, goths, and gangs of sweet little old ladies, all drinking pints of Chodovar beer.  

These caves were originally hollowed out to store or ‘lager’ the beer, cut from solid granite.  The natural temperature in here os between 3 and 5 degrees celcius, and beyond the restaurant and the tourist tat, horizontal fermentation tanks are still embedded in the rock.
Jiri Plevka’s family have worked here as brewers for 220 years.  In 1992 they took over as managers, and Jiri now runs the place.  “Every member of the family is a brewer,” he says. “Beer is our blood.  What matters to us the most is the quality of the beer.  Money comes second.” 
They certainly make a lot of money – we’re only nine miles form the German border, and this complex has all the hallmarks of a coach trip tourist trap – so if money only comes second, the beer has to be amazing.  
And it is.  
Jiri brings us pints of unfiltered, unpasteurised lager straight for the cellar, a beer that’s only available in this restaurant.  It’s an elixir to my hangover, a bready, spicy, grassy Kellerbier.  
Chodovar is a geographical curiosity.  I’ve always said that Bohemia and Bavaria, separated by a national border, are in fact two halves of a beery nation that belong together, and you really feel that here.  Josef Groll, the brewer who made Plzen famous, was a Bavarian.  You get the impression that Chodovar does more business with Germans than Czechs, and there are German influences in the brewing.  But the region has Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status form the EU, meaning that ‘Chodske Pivo’ is unique – only ever brewed with ingredients from this region, including Saaz hops.
Just to confuse the regional identity further though, the local pronunciation of ‘Chodske’ sounds very similar to the way the Czechs talk about ‘Scotland’, and they joke that Scotland is the most northerly part of Chodske.  “Both places enjoy rainy weather, beautiful countryside, and have the same crops – you make whisky from the same ingredients as beer,” says Jiri.  
He underlines this by distilling a clear spirit from his beer.  But maybe he’s taking things a bit too far when he insists that he plays bagpipes at home.

OK it might just look like an empty room.  But this is a traditional floor maltings! In a brewery!

After this first beer we get a tour of the brewery.  It malts its own barley in an impressive maltings, with three female maltsters.  The traditional back-breaking work of turning the grain is made substantially easier with the help of little sit-on lawnmower-type machines that turn the malt.

The brewhouse itself is lovely, like all Czech brewhouses, all gleaming copper and long, fat, shiny pipes.

They do know how to build a lovely brewhouse in the Czech Republic

But it’s those granite cellars where the magic happens.  In the week that A-B Inbev shamefully refused to tell journalists how long the new “premium” Stella Black is matured for – despite having the audacity to launch it on a positioning that it is ‘matured for longer’ –  Chodovar gave us a powerful reminder of the magic and integrity of true lagering, and a demonstration of how keen a brewer is to talk about lagering times when they have nothing to be ashamed of on that score.

The main lagers are aged for four to six weeks.  That’s because a true lager has to be aged for that long to give it its unique, delicate character.  A real lager is not less flavourful than a good ale; it’s just flavoured differently, and it’s as beautiful as any ale, and a lot more drinkable.  Taste this stuff and I defy you to not start sounding like the worst kind of CAMRA loon.  It defies belief that most of the beer we drink exists on a scale of tasteless to offensive, when it’s supposed to be like this.  This stuff is not more challenging or complex than mainstream British standard lager, it’s not more difficult to get into, it’s no less refreshing or crisp or any other things we want form standard lager.  It’s just better.  And that’s because it’s been made with love and care – and time.  This beer is lagered for four to six weeks.  If rumours are correct, certain leading british lager brands are lagered for one day – or even less.  

Go figure.

Deep in the granite caves, this man is about to make Tierney-Jones quite tearful

If that’s me getting a bit emotional about lager, you should have seen Tierney-Jones when we were given a tour of the lagering tanks, bricked into narrow granite passages with wet floors, and Jiri poured off some of his ‘Spezial’ beer, a Marzen style brew that will be ready at the end of September.  It’s been i the tanks for one and a half months so far.  It’s absolutely divine.  Jiri thinks it’s getting there.

In the brewery yard is a fountain that springs from the brewery’s well.  A statue to St Joseph presides over the fountain.  Behind his back, there’s a second tap from the wellspring, out of which comes beer.  You pray to St Joseph for great beer, and he delivers.

Not much has changed here for 600 years.  Obviously lager styles have (they call it lager here, not Pilsner – they don’t believe Plzen brews the best beer) and technology has, but the soul of the beer, the love for it, the sheer bloody loveliness of it, is as eternal as the granite.

Chodovar’s slogan is “Your beer wellness land”.  This is largely because it is the home of the beer spa, which we visited.  But that deserves a post all of its own – coming soon…

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The New Czech Revolution

“This is a very typical Czech pub,” said Jan, our guide, as we entered our first stop of the night.

“Unbelievably Czech,” he said, as we walked past a heavily grafittied door and reached the top of a windy flat of steps.

“Worryingly Czech,” he concluded, as we entered a room made of a series of arches and were shown to our table in the corner, my eyes already starting to water a little from the smoke.

But behind the bar, and in the cellar, what was going on was very un-Czech.

The ironically named ‘Bad Times’ – Zly Casy

Evan Rail is an American who’s lived in Prague for about a decade.  “I used to live in Dresden.  One night I had a dream about going to Prague and I told my flatmates I was thinking of visiting, and they said, ‘pack your stuff, dude, you won’t be coming back.'”  He’s brought us to Zly Casy (Bad Times – “Named because people used to come to the pub for good times, and now they come to talk about the bad times”) because it’s the centre of a new Czech brewing revolution.

My first beer is Rarasek, a refreshing wheat beer with a definite banoffee character but no spiciness, making it clean and refreshing.  The we have an ‘English pale ale’ from Kocour, who’s branding alone tells you whoever owns the brewery has been inspired by Stone, and maybe by Brew Dog – whose livery adorns the walls.  Kocour doesn’t taste like an English pale ale, but it does taste absolutely wonderful, delicately laced with new world hops and reminding Young Dredge of Nelson Sauvin-influenced Kipling.

The Czech take on English pale ale, via the US West Coast, and possibly New Zealand

Hanz, who owns this bar (“The Germans spell it with an ‘s’, so I spell it with a ‘z'”) sources all the beers himself from Bohemia, and across the border into Austria and Germany.  There’s a cross-fertilisation going on between these brewing traditions, taking in elements of Belgian, American and British brewing too.  This pub, and a handful of others like it, have formed a collective which seeks to promote interesting craft beer and work hard to serve it in the very best condition.  There are 25 taps on the bar here – there’s a pub opening in a few weeks that will have 30.

“All these pubs – they just used to serve Staropramen, or Pilsner Urquell.  That was all you could get.  Now you’re getting young guys coming in here boasting that they’ve been to Orval or Westverleteren and brining those kinds of tastes back with them,” says Evan.

For our next stop we go to the end of the tramline to Prvni Pivni Tramway, affectionately referred to as a ‘pajzl’, which roughly translates as a dive or a shithole, but in a good way – my favourite type of pub.

A dive.  A dive that has Brew Dog Trashy Blonde on tap.

As we walk in, the barman rings a loud bell, which I take to mean it’s last orders.  But no – it’s an old tram bell, rung ion welcome as we walked through the door.  The seats are made from old tram benches, “The kind that are designed to be so uncomfortable that you cannot fall asleep on the tram and miss your stop.”  Barcelona v Benfica is on the TV.  Brew Dog’s Trashy Blonde is on tap.  “None of this existed three years ago,” says Evan, “You simply couldn’t get these beers or beer styles in Prague.”

And finally, it’s back into town to Jama.  There are three of these now, all serving great beer.

There’s just one thing that worries me about all this.  I love the global craft brewing movement and I love American beers a great deal.  But there’s a hint of triumphalism in some of the tweets I get back through the night, sharing this new wave of Czech beers.  There’s a certain kind of beer fan who’s never been happy with the fact that a great brewing tradition here was focused around lager, and now there’s perhaps a sense that the Czechs have seen the error of their ways and are embracing the same craft ales popular everywhere else.  My worry is that we’re in danger of losing a wonderful lager brewing tradition – I never had a problem with Czech beer.  In fact I love it.  I thought craft brewing was meant to be about regional and local diversity, and I’m uncomfortable that the same new world hops and beer styles seem to be permeating all corners of the globe.  is this the end for great Czech lager?

Evan puts me at ease.  “Czech lager brewing is growing alongside this stuff,” he says.  “There are so many new Czech style beers, but they’re coming from micros and brew pubs.  These other beers only account for a tiny portion of the total.  It’s only the giants that are losing out.”

None of us were expecting to see this in Prague, and we’re delighted that we did.  In ten minutes we set off for Pislen, via Chodovar, home of the beer spa.  Let’s see what’s happening there.

I hadn’t realised Tim Hampson fro the Guild of Beer Writers was here with us too.  Between me, him and Adrian, someone needs to be running a sweepstake on who’s the first to use phrases like, “When you get to my age,” with Young Dredge.

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On our way to Prague!

Hurrah!

ATJ, Young Dredge and I, plus a couple of other beery types, are embarking on a visit to the Czech Republic, to take in the new attractions at the Pilsner Brewery visitors centre, the Pilsen Beer Fest and the famous Chodovar beer spa!  It’s going to be messy.  It’s going to be sticky.

What’s exciting about this trip is that it’s been put on by the Czech Tourism Board specifically to get British beer bloggers blogging about the Czech beer scene.  After several years where blogging was seen as somehow inferior to written journalism, the Czechs are the first people I know of to really engage with bloggers and go all out to court them.

I’m not going to let their hospitality lure me into writing adoring puff pieces, but I’m expecting the trip is going to be pretty damn enjoyable.  And because I’ve been invited in a blogging capacity, I’m going to cover it as fully as I can in blog form, in as close to real time as I can.  I’m going to aim to post at least once a day to report on our progress.

This is the first post – live from the new free Wi-Fi on the Heathrow Express.

First stop tonight – a tour of Prague pubs with Czech beer expert and author of CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide to Prague, Evan Rail!

Na Zdravi!

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British Guild of Beer Writers Awards 2010 launched

I’ve probably written too much about writing about beer rather than about beer itself in recent months but please indulge me one last time, because this one is important.

Last December I was named Beer Writer of the Year at the British Guild of Beer Writers Awards.  Blimey, but it’s gone quick.

One of the perks of the job is that this year I have to chair the judges for Beer Writer of the Year 2010.  I’ve assembled a panel of judges who I feel will be thorough and fair in terms of rewarding work that fulfils the Guild’s stated aims “To improve standards of beer writing and extend the public knowledge of beer.”  I’m the only beer writer among them: there’s a brewer, a national newspaper journalist and a food writer.  Between us, we’re looking for writing where the passion for beer is obvious – and infectious.

The rise of beer blogging has seen a huge increase in entries to the awards, which is a fantastic thing – bloggers have re-energised the whole discipline of beer writing.  There’s a category for online beer communication which potentially covers everything from tweets to e-books, but there are other categories such as beer and food writing or the travel bursary where blog posts can also compete.  Entries are judged on their merits.  At least two of our judges don’t know their Protz from their Cooking Lager, so if there are any conspiracy theorists out there thinking of wading in about old boys’ networks (two of the four judges are women by the way), the difference between ‘professional’ writers and amateurs, old media versus new media, forget it – we just want to reward the very best beer writing, irrespective of where it comes from or where it’s going.

The press release for the awards is here.  And this year, to encourage as many entries as possible, I’ve gathered received wisdom from previous Beer Writers of the Year/Chairmen of Judges to write a detailed set of guidelines for entrants.  We’ve also tweaked the wording of the six categories of the awards, to make things as clear and open as possible.

This year we’ve also imposed a rule limiting the maximum number of entries in any one category to six.  It’s about quality, not quantity – in recent years, prizes have been given to people who submitted a single piece of work.  So if you’re a blogger thinking of entering, now’s the time to look back over your work this year and choose the pieces that really stand out.  (If you haven’t got comments from people after a post saying how good it was, and you’re still thinking of entering it, just have another look).

So the field is open.  Anything written in the 12 months to 30th September 2010, to be submitted by 8th October.  If you have any questions, please do read the press release and the guidelines for entrants, and if they don’t answer them, let me know!

Looking forward to reading your work in October.

  

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Edinburgh 24th August

My kinda town

I love Edinburgh.  I’d live there if I could.  Next week I’m up there speaking at one of the most prestigious events I’ve yet been invited to take part in – the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which runs alongside the Edinburgh Festival.

My event is called ‘A Raucous History of the Beer that Built the British Empire’ and it’s at 8.30pm on 24 August in Peppers Theatre.  Full details are here.  If you’re in town, please do come along.  I’m quite nervous about this one so will be writing and rehearsing my talk extra diligently, which means it’s going to be brilliant.

Yes I really am steering the bloody ship

At the same time in another venue there’s some bloke called Andrew Sachs in conversation with an obscure local writer called Alexander McCall Smith.  So.  No competition then.

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