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DAILY ALCOHOL LIMITS NOT REALLY WORKING FOR US, SAY DRINKERS

A friend recently introduced me to The Daily Mash, a spoof newspaper that will feel familiar to fans of The Onion, but is written in the UK.  It’s razor-sharp topical, so much so that I often read the spoof stories on here before I’ve heard the real news headlines they’re taking the piss out of.  I thought the following, published today, would amuse readers of this blog.  Hopefully they won’t mind me reproducing it in its entirety:

 

‘Piss off!’

THESE recommended daily limits on alcohol the government has come up with are really not doing it for us, drinkers said last night.Beer and wine enthusiasts across the UK stressed that while three to four units may sound reasonable, it’s obviously not going to get you trousered, even if you’re a lady.They are now calling on the government to rethink its guidelines or better still just leave them alone and go and bother fat people instead.Tom Logan, a trainee solicitor from Northampton, said: “It seems to me that they may have confused a safe daily limit with what I like to call ‘lunch’.”He added: “Of an evening I like to smash through the limit with a convivial pint or two after work, before I then jump up and down on the limit and set fire to it with a nice bottle of Pinot Grigio.”I manage to do all this without bothering anyone else. The worst that happens is an occasional tendency to fall asleep and urinate all over the sofa, but, and I’m sure we’re all agreed, that’s my problem.”Emma Bishop, a marketing executive from Twickenham, added: “How’s about this? As an adult, I think a reasonable daily limit is me drinking as much as I fucking want.”If it affects my work I’ll get sacked. If it affects my relationships I’ll be all lonely and sad.”And as for my health, following a quick glance at my tax bill I’ve decided that the NHS will treat me and the government can keep its fucking opinions to itself.”

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You wait eighteen years for a TV series on beer and then two come along at once

I posted recently about the Neil Morrissey/Richard Fox series on Channel 4, with a mixture of criticism, praise and barefaced envy.  Now it’s Oz Clarke and James May’s turn.  Oz and James aren’t brewing their own beer, but are travelling Britain in search of the ‘drink that best speaks for the country’.  Which is beer of course, but they need to keep the concept broad enough to include whisky, cider and the occasional vineyard.
So putting even greater jealousy over this one to one side (because I was talking to someone about doing something very similar the day before it was announced this series was being made) what’s the series like? 
As with Morrissey Fox, I’ve spoken to many in the brewing industry who see it as childish, laddish, flippant, and not that educational about beer.  After the first episode this was the camp I was in.  It’s on the BBC, so instead of Morrissey/Fox’s fucking cunts we have lots of flipping fatheads instead.  When they visited Thornbridge, they used more footage of the boys pretending to get lost on the estate and having to turn the caravan around than they did from the seven hours they spent filming with the brewers, talking about hops and sampling their amazing beers.  The bit where they got pissed on a succession of Yorkshire train stations served no televisual purpose whatsoever.  And after the 100th time, Oz’s shit pretend Yorkshire accent really started to shred my nerves.
I watched the second and third programmes because I felt I had to.  And as the series settled in, I found myself utterly disarmed.  This is the third series on drink the pair have done together, so they must be doing something right.  And the thing is… their on-screen chemistry really works.  It’s very, very funny.  James May is obviously a far more intelligent and thoughtful man than the persona he portrays onscreen, and his comic timing is brilliant.  I hope for his friends and family’s sake that Oz on-screen is also an exaggeration of Oz in person, but put the two together and they play off each other wonderfully.  
So far, it’s true, I’ve learned absolutely nothing I didn’t already know about beer.  I didn’t expect to.  You come away with a vague knowledge of brewing ingredients and processes, and that’s it.  This is disappointing to those already knowledgeable, because they believe that people just need to be educated about beer and then they’ll love it.  This series is an opportunity to do so, but it’s taken a very lackadaisical approach to the task, preferring instead to focus on laddish larks around breweries and in a caravan.  I’ve even picked up several errors and inaccuracies in the brief descriptions of beer styles and processes.
But I have enough failed and rejected TV pitches under my belt to know that the days of informative lectures on screen are dead.  First and foremost TV has to be entertaining, because if it’s not people will switch over.  As I’ve often said on here, you might not like it, but that’s how it is.  And Oz and James Drink to Britain is very entertaining.  And more than that, it’s entertaining in a beery way.  You come away really fancying a pint.  
I’ve always argued that beer’s cultural role is far more interesting to the average punter than its taste profile, especially if you’re in a situation where you’re talking about beer rather than drinking it.  In today’s neo-puritanical age, here are two blokes making a series about how much fun it is to drink during the daytime.  They get to a stage where they’re clearly feeling the effects, but not behaving like twats.  They may not tell you much about how to seriously taste beer, but the entire series is suffused with the warm glow, the buzz, the feeling of what it’s like to have had a few pints and be content that, in your little corner of it at least, everything is right with the world.  In that sense, it’s the best publicity for beer I can possibly imagine.    
I went along to the launch of the tie-in book this morning down at the Market Porter in Borough Market.  The place was rammed and it was difficult to get near the two stars.  When I did, they answered my questions about beer in a very flip and entertaining manner, clearly more interested in taking the piss out of each other than talking about which amazing micros stood out in their minds months after filming has finished.  When I first started writing about beer, this is how I said we should be selling it to those who are not currently convinced.  I’m grateful to them for reminding me of the true value of beer.
       

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BrewDog rapped for Speedball beer drug connotations

This happened yesterday:

Scottish brewer BrewDog has had its Speedball beer brand pulled from UK shelves following a complaint about the product’s intimated link to drugs.

UK drinks industry body The Portman Group said today (20 January) that its independent complaints panel has upheld a complaint under the group’s code of practice, brought by Alcohol Focus Scotland, claiming the beer’s marketing is associated with illicit drugs.

Speedball is the name given to the practice of combining heroin and crack cocaine to give both sedative and stimulant effects, the Portman Group said.

The drink is marketed by BrewDog as a “class A ale” containing “a vicious cocktail of active ingredients” which creates a “happy-sad” effect.

“The blurring of alcohol and illicit drugs fosters unhealthy attitudes to drinking and trivialises drug misuse.,” said David Poley, chief executive of the Portman Group. “BrewDog is profiteering from the scourge of illegal drugs, mocking the misery caused by misuse.

“We are taking urgent action to protect the public from exposure to such negligent marketing.”

A retailer alert bulletin will be issued to retailers in the UK, urging them to remove the drink from sale until its marketing is altered to comply with the code.

The co-founder of BrewDog, Martin Dickie, defended the company’s behaviour. “The Portman Group has attacked us for our marketing instead of going after the companies who are mass-selling products cheaply and causing the nation’s alcohol problems,” he said.

“This is a drink which, in the UK, had a release of 1,184 bottles and cost GBP3 a bottle, so Speedball is for those who enjoy a quality beer responsibly and enjoy a premium drink at a premium price.

“Technically, the name fits within the product. The ingredients are natural stimulants including guarana and kola nuts with natural depressants Californian poppy and hops, so it is a speedball of a combination.”

Love the beer, love the brewery. Agree with the point the lads are making. But at the same time, I’m not sure it was a great idea to launch this beer with the specific intention of getting this result. Yes, it gives them an opportunity to put a case forward, but in an attention-deficient age where most people read the headline and skim the rest of a story, I worry that if you just get the barest facts or read reports like this one half way, then you’re going to walk away on Portman’s side. Am I being an old fart about this?

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The difference the Atlantic makes

Every British beer drinkers knows Foster’s – an ‘Aussie’ lager brewed under licence in the UK, the second-biggest beer brand in the country.  I like lager as much as ale and I try to keep an open mind, but I used some in a beer tasting recently (they wanted to learn about lager) and a can from the supermarket proved utterly undrinkable – not just in my opinion, but in that of the beer-tasting novices who had poured it from a can and really thought about the flavour for the first time in their lives.  Maybe that’s why Foster’s these days trumpets the virtues of ‘extra-cold’ so loudly in their ads.
Not a lot of Brits know that Foster’s lager is also available in the US.  And today, when I was looking at funnies on The Onion, I was held up by a banner ad for their latest product launch:


Yes, Foster’s has launched an ALE.  At least, it claims to be an ale.  It has caramel colouring added, and may be a lager in disguise, but the website makes a great deal of how it tastes different from the lager: caramel and fruit aromas versus ‘light malt aroma’, and a ‘smooth caramel finish’ rather than a ‘light hop finish’.  More interestingly, the beer aficionados at beeradvocate say on the whole that it tastes pretty decent.  I’m sure it will never give the likes of Stone or Dogfish Head sleepless nights, they’ve seemingly launched a perfectly drinkable beer.

It makes me want to cry, really it does.  What does it say about this country and its attitude to beer that this kind of launch would be unthinkable here?  Crucially, Foster’s in the UK is brewed and marketed by S&N Heineken, whereas it’s a Miller brand in the US.  But Miller are here too, doing a very good job of Peroni and Pilsner Urquell, and they show not the slightest intention of going anywhere near ale.
This is not a CAMRA rant; it’s a flavour rant, the latest example of how beer is summarily excluded by drinkers, major corporate brewers and food and drink writers alike from the revolution that’s happening on the British palate.  Every year it feels like we make little bits of progress, then something like this makes you see how far there is to go.  

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New Blog

Is anyone interested in reading my thoughts on stuff other than beer?  I don’t really care.  But occasionally I do have the urge to write about other things.

The thing about this beer blog is it’s here for professional reasons – to promote my career as an author and beer pundit.  
But every now and then there are other things I want to write about – things I feel strongly about, ideas I maybe want to work up a bit, or stuff to just get off my chest.  Just an ordinary blog then, like millions of others.  But having it as a blog rather than just a diary provides a bit of motivation to write it, craft it, think about it rather than just forgetting it.  If anyone else wants to read it, I’m flattered.
So if you fancy a chat about Barnsley FC, music, cool books, life in London, love-hate (mostly hate) relationships with advertising and marketing, then please drop by to Pete Brown’s other blog!

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2008: what the blazes was all THAT about?

Having blogged fairly regularly for the first time throughout the past year, I have an urge to do a sort of round-up thing. It’s purely subjective, skewed and very possibly inaccurate, but I’d welcome any comments, additions or disagreements.

It’s been a great and terrible year for beer. The beer market is in freefall in volume terms, attacked on every side. It’s not made any better when people who regard themselves as guardians and spokespeople for the industry are the loudest voices shouting about about ‘the death of the pub’ as if it’s a reality – you’re just helping to make it so, guys.  Also, we’ve been talking for years about a renaissance in the appreciation of our national drink, and while there always seems to be progress, the idea of widespread love of interesting beer, even to the same degree it currently happens in the US, still seems a long way off.

But on the other hand, I think we’ll look back on 2008 as the year British brewing began to rest one eye on the future instead of being perpetually preoccupied with the past. Four years ago, when I was in America researching Three Sheets, I tasted Cascade hops for the first time and bemoaned a lack of such flavour in Britain. We used to ask why British brewers insisted on brewing a portfolio of beers that were all 4.5% mid-brown session bitters. That criticism now seems out of place. Obviously Brew Dog get the headlines for their daring and authority-baiting brews, but use of North American hops is now commonplace in the UK. Wood ageing of beers is widespread, and many brewers now seem unafraid to incorporate Belgian influences or just bloody well experiment a bit. This is not a discussion about the politics of beer – if you like drinking the stuff, it’s just fantastic to have more variety and flavour more easily accessible.

For me personally, I feel like I spent more time in 1823 than 2008. After getting back from my IPA-to-India trip a year ago, I was planning on finishing the book by the end of January. Then I got lost in history, wrote a book that was nearly twice as long as planned, and didn’t hand it in till October. Next year sees a painful edit and a rush to get the book out in June. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written. It’s not as good as it could be, but books never are. I can’t wait to share it with you.

So here, in no particular order, are a few highs and lows:

BEST THING THAT HAPPENED IN BEER THIS YEAR
Winner: Beer Exposed in September – it wasn’t perfect, but it reinvented what beer festivals can be like. If they learn the lessons from this year, and if more brewers, having seen it work, join in, the 2009 event will be phenomenal.

Runner-up: The widespread new experimentalism of British brewers.

WORST THING THAT HAPPENED IN BEER THIS YEAR
Winner: tax, tax ,tax.

Runner-up: obvious to anyone who has endured reading me over the last few months – the slow death of Stella Artois, once my favourite brand, now presided over by people who see beer as just another grocery brand, no different from cat food or laundry detergent.

MY PERSONAL BEER HIGHLIGHT OF THE YEAR
Winner: learning how to brew – or starting to. A day brewing Jaipur at Thornbridge in the summer saw my first (and hopefully last) stint cleaning out a copper from the inside. Then I was lucky enough to be invited on Everard’s gold brewing course, where we recreated an authentic nineteenth century IPA. I’m still trying to flog stories on these – if I fail, I will write them up on here in the New Year – when I also hope to be doing lots more brewing.

Runner-up: a Goose Island beer and food matching dinner at the White Horse in Parson’s Green, with the head brewer introducing each of the beers. Mere sensual bliss…

MY PERSONAL BEER LOW POINT OF THE YEAR
Winner: Having a very exciting meeting with a development producer from ITV where we agreed in principle to develop an idea for a series that would see me going around Britain investigating different regional beer styles and stories. Then reading THE NEXT DAY the announcement that Oz Clarke and James May were filming the same idea.

Runner-up: Having a very promising meeting with a development producer from an independent production company, who eventually turned down the idea of serialising Man Walks into a Pub but said they would love to film me doing a beery journey, something ambitious, that I was doing anyway, that had historic roots but contemporary relevance… and me saying, “WHERE WERE YOU A YEAR AGO WHEN I WAS TRYING TO GET PEOPLE INTERESTED IN FILMING MY JOURNEY TO INDIA?” and them saying, “Yes, we’d definitely have been interested in that”.

BREWER OF THE YEAR
Winner: Stefano Cossi at Thornbridge. Possible bias here because I saw him at work close up, but I’m blown away by his combination of experimentation and obsessive rigour and quality control. His beers have consistently wowed. With a new, bigger brewhouse almost complete, 2009 could be Thornbridge’s year.

Runner-up: Alastair Hook at Meantime. Awarded Brewer of the Year by the British Guild of Beer Writers, he consistently and tirelessly pushes quality and flavour ever closer to the mainstream drinker.

BEER OF THE YEAR
Winner: Orkney’s Dark Island Reserve. Matured in malt casks for three months, 10% ABV, full of fruit, spice, wood and malt. It’s not the most challenging or extreme of the new wood aged beers but it’s perfectly balanced and, importantly, perfectly packaged. It looks great, and these days that’s just as important as the product delivery if you want to change perceptions of what beer can be.

Runner-up: Brooklyner-Schneider Hopfen-Weisse – a collaboration between Garrett Oliver and the ancient German Schneider brewery. It tastes like what it is: a hybrid of North American hoppy craft brew and spicy, banana-scented German wheat beer. It’s fragrant, it’s fruity, it’s fabulous.

Honourable mention: Brew Dog’s 13% IPA that’s been matured in a whisky cask for 18 months with a load of strawberries. The result is more like a Sauternes than a beer. Amazing.

SLOPBUCKET OF THE YEAR
Winner: Alastair Darling for his one-man mission to kill off the pub industry.

Runner up: the renowned home brewer who keeps collaring me at industry events to tell me my IPA journey was a) full of errors and b) pointless. Get a life.

Blogging is not always a comfortable pursuit.  There’s a tension between the democracy of blogging for all and the unapologetic use of blogs by writers such as myself for personal promotion.  It’s often hard to know where to draw the line between the professional and the personal.  Any writer writes because they have a need to be listened to, and whatever that says about our psyches and frail egos, I’m gratified that people read this blog and link to it and recommend it. I apologise to anyone I’ve offended on here – I try not to.  I hope you’ve enjoyed reading most of what I’ve written, and wish you a happy and prosperous 2009.
Cheers
Pete  

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Is it alright to like Morrissey Fox?

Saviours of the ale industry?  Or a pair of twats?  As they say on reality TV, YOU decide...

One of the most controversial beer stories this year is the entry of man behaving badly Neil Morrissey into the brewing industry, with his mate Richard Fox.  They took over a pub, Ye Olde Punch Bowl at Marton cum Grafton in Yorkshire, built a microbrewery in the back garden, started turning out a golden ale that was very quickly listed nationwide in Tesco, and got the whole thing made into a TV show, Neil Morrissey’s Risky Business, which ran for three weeks on Channel 4.   
The whole saga sent the beer world into a bit of a tizz, and we can summarise the debate as follows.  On the one hand, the brewing industry is gasping for breath and celebrity involvement is the oxygen of our times.  It can only be a good thing.  They’re brewing real ale rather than lager – nothing wrong with lager of course, but ale needs publicity to help challenge outdated perceptions of it.  And in the TV series, they managed to get beer on the telly for the first time since Michael Jackson’s Beer Hunter, seventeen years ago.
So what’s the problem?  Well, they’re interlopers.  They swan in from nowhere, with no brewing background, and suddenly it’s their beer in Tesco and them on the telly.  That’s just not fair.  Brewers are jealous of the success of the beer, and people like me are jealous because it should be us on the telly because we’ve been trying for years and we’ve all put so much more work in.  They’re famous, we’re jealous and bitter.  
And the telly programme itself – was it a good advertisement for beer?  Reviews were mixed, and many industry grumblers felt it was too laddish.  Too much swearing.  As we know, in some corners of the industry these are terrible crimes.
I must confess I’m ambivalent myself.  I’ve known Richard Fox for a few years and he’s a really nice bloke.  He’s a great ambassador for beer, particularly at live events where he evangelises beer and food matching.  But I’ve had about five or six serious attempts at getting my books turned into TV series and never succeeded.  They have a book tie-in which has an endorsement on the front from Richard Hammond – why can’t I have a quote from Richard Hammond?  And the book shamelessly and without credit rips off an idea from Man Walks into a Pub.  
So I’m a bit resentful and jealous, at the same time as feeling sneery and critical of people in the brewing industry who feel the same way.  To resolve my feelings one way or the other, I went along a few weeks ago to the official trade launch of Morrissey Fox, with the intention of letting the beer itself do the talking.
My quest for objectivity ran into trouble straight away, because the two stars were pouring the beer themselves, working the bar like pros.  Richard greeted me warmly and immediately introduced me TV’s Neil Morrissey.  I was a big fan of Men Behaving Badly in its day, but I wasn’t star-struck because Neil is a genuinely warm and nice bloke who genuinely makes you feel like a mate.  He may have been laying it on a bit thick when he said he was star-struck at meeting me!  Turns out he’s a big fan of Man Walks into a Pub, having read it when Hugo Speer out of The Full Monty gave him a copy and said he had to read it.
Having seen The Full Monty I can, unfortunately, only ever picture Hugo Speer in a red leather thong.  I imagined him wearing this, all oiled-up, while handing over a fake-tan-stained copy of my first book to the man who does the voice of Bob the Builder.  It was a moment I could never have imagined at the start of my writing career.
Anyway, I tried my best to put this out of my head, and moved on to the beers. 
The blonde ale is a blonde ale.  I like blonde ales a lot and I like the way they bring people into the ale category for the first time.  Morrissey Fox blonde ale was not at all bad and it was not the best I’ve tasted.  There’s not much more I can say about it, but that shouldn’t be seen as a criticism.
The best bitter was a different story.  This was a very fine beer indeed: chocolatey brown with a nice tight head, it was nutty and toffeeish and caramelly and very, very smooth, complex but insanely drinkable.  I loved it.
Finally there was a Christmas ale, full of spicy and fruity flavours.  It felt a bit obvious – too much of a collection of elements rather than a blended whole.  But not unpleasant.  
So they may be spawny gets who have more attention than they deserve.  Or they may be very talented brewers who simply have more drive and nous than other brewers and beery media wannabes.  Whatever, they are really, really nice blokes who genuinely love beer, and they’ve made two not-bad beers and one fantastic beer.  If you just take that last sentence and forget the controversy and jealousy over the media circus, that’s good enough for me.

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The ‘Death’ of the pub – a global news story

After seemingly trying to destroy the pub for the last few years, the media seem to be having a change of heart, with a flurry of articles mourning the death of the British pub over the last week or two, and even a programme on the subject on the BBC last Friday.

And it’s attracted attention from overseas too: last week in the space of two days I gave a lengthy interview to a Dutch broadsheet newspaper on the subject, and a TV interview to the same country’s equivalent of Newsnight.  Thankfully they went easier on me than Paxman would have.
Knowing a bit of Dutch might help you follow the narrative, but most of the interviews here are in English.  You need to fast forward through the programme to 10 minutes 30 secs.

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Now I’m Britain’s second-best beer blogger!

Sorry to be an egotist for a minute but last night I attended the British Guild of Beer Writers (don’t laugh) annual awards ceremony.  This year saw the first award given for ‘Best use of new media’, and I picked up the silver for this blog, plus the website for the Intelligent Choice Report, which means this blog is now officially Britain’s second-best beer blog.

Older readers may remember that about 18 months ago I was runner-up in the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group’s Beer Drinker of the Year Award, which I took to mean I was Britain’s second-best beer drinker.  Some might say that on this performance, I’m carving out a niche for myself as the biggest Number Two on the British beer writing scene.
The judge’s comments were of course complimentary, but laced with a thread of chastisement.  Apparently I’m “improving” as a journalist, with the main improvement being that I’m “less laddish”.  I can only apologise to fans of my first book, Man Walks into a Pub, for this development, and promise to try to be more fatuous, rude and irreverent in future.  Let me start by urging you to go here and click on ‘drunk words’, for a reminder of the kind of writing that has apparently prevented me from winning much in the past.
When I won silver I simply assumed that I’d been beaten by Stonch – but it seems it wasn’t his year.  The gold award went to Zak Avery, who embraced the medium more fully than I by being more prolific and also posting a regular video diary.  Given that I have trouble pasting pictures on this blog, if you’re going to call your award ‘best use’ of new media he deserves it hands down.
Zak then went on to beat some very distinguished and talented writers to be named overall Beer Writer of the Year – a magnificent achievement for someone who is a relative newcomer to the scene.  Congratulations Zak.
The only problem I have with this result is that I just assumed Ben McFarland was going to win this year.  If you win one year you’re not allowed to enter the next, and Ben has won every year he’s been allowed to enter since he started writing.  Zak’s success means I now have to face competition from Ben in the awards next year when my new book comes out.  Looks like the best I can hope for will be number two again.    

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