Tag: Hops and Glory

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“Events, dear boy, events!” (As Harold Macmillan probably didn’t say)

Early
autumn is busy at the best of times and I have a book coming out in October.
Here’s what’s keeping me on the road and off the streets for the next couple
months.
FRIDAY
23RD AUGUST: APG PLANNING RAMBLE IN SOUTHWARK
This one goes out to all the ad industry planners doing the job I used to do. I’m leading a meander of planners around Southwark tomorrow lunchtime, discussing Shakespeare’s Local and ending up in The George. Contact Sarah Newman at the APG to book a place if you’re interested.
SATURDAY
24TH AUGUST: HOPS AND GLORY AT THE HOPS AND GLORY!
4PM
I feel a bit bad that a pub named after George Orwell – one of the greatest ever English writers – was changed to the name of one of my books. But not too bad. The Hops & Glory is an excellent pub at the top of Essex Road in Islington. This Bank Holiday Weekend it’s having an IPA festival, and they invited me down to do a talk on the history of possible the greatest ever beer style. I’ll be talking, reading from Hops & Glory, signing books and tasting beers.
(After my talk, I’ll be checking out two other excellent Bank Holiday events in pubs that are walking distance from the Hops & Glory, purely as punter: a weekend-long cider festival at The Alma on Newington Green, and a celebration of East London Breweries at the Duke of Wellington on Balls Pond Road.)
THURSDAY 29TH AUGUST: THE HISTORY OF BRITAIN THROUGH BEER, WITH MEANTIME BREWERY
Meantime’s Old Brewery hosts a monthly beer dinner where you get to taste a stunning array of beers bound together by a loose theme. I was delighted to be asked back to do a new one after a successful IPA dinner at the end of last year. The theme for this one is the role of beer throughout British history, and a look at the different forces that have shaped the development of beer, and the way beer has in turn influenced the development of society. The beers on the menu are a symbolic, rather than literal, representation of key styles over time, starting from the present day and moving back in time. Here’s the menu in full:
A History of Britain According to Beer
The Old Brewery Beer and Food Night Menu
  
Introduction
Meantime London Pilsner
Timothy Taylor Landlord
Starter
Smoked eel, carrot and beetroot salad, horseradish
cream
Hobson’s Mild
Main
Beef Wellington, Welsh potato cakes, ale gravy
Redchurch Great Eastern IPA
Dessert
Apple pie with custard & vanilla ice cream
Meantime London Porter
Cheese
A selection of British cheese with beer chutney &
crackers
St Bernardus Pater C
  
To finish
Kernel Export Stout
Full details and ticket booking are available at the Meantime Old Brewery website.
SATURDAY 21ST SEPTEMBER:
WORLD’S BEST CIDER AT ABERGAVENNY FOOD FESTIVAL
The ‘Glastonbury of Food Festivals’ (copyright: the entire foodie media) has become a bit of a regular fixture for me and every year it’s so good I decide that I’m emigrating to Wales before subsequently sobering up. This year Bill Bradshaw and I will be talking about World’s Best Cider and sampling a few different ciders from around the world. 
Tickets for this event have already sold out! Returns may be available. But the next day, Bill will be interviewing one of my favourite cider makers – Simon Day from Once Upon A Tree. Simon’s ciders are quite unlike anything you might imagine, recalling the seventeenth century tradition of Herefordshire fine cyder. I’ll be in the front row holding my glass up. Tickets are available here.

THURSDAY 17TH OCTOBER:
WORLD’S BEST CIDER LAUNCH!
The book hits the shelves! We’ll be doing various events around the country. Details will go up here when confirmed. 

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“Shakespeare’s Pub” – and my other books – now available in America

Good morning America!

Over the years I’ve been asked by many North American readers of this blog if my books are available in the United States. As of now, they all are!

Today the first ever US-bespoke edition of one of my books is published. My last book, Shakespeare’s Local, hits American shelves today as Shakespeare’s Pub: A Barstool History of London As Seen Through the Windows of Its Oldest Pub – The George Inn. (I’ve noticed on my trips to the States that you guys LOVE a long subtitle).

It’s published by St Martin’s Press, the US partner of my UK publisher, Pan Macmillan, and there’s a bit more information about them and the book on their website, along with a really quite lovely gallery of the photos and illustrations used in the book.

The thing about your long subtitles is that it kind of tells you everything you need to know about the book (there’s actually a riff in Shakespeare’s Pub about the Stuart-era fashion for even longer subtitles and their similarity to those movie trailers that give away the whole plot.) But I’ll elaborate a little for those who don’t know.

The pub has been hailed as ‘the primordial cell of British life’. For centuries, pubs have provided the glue that holds communities together. They are more than shops that sell drink, different from bars in that people feel a greater sense of ownership and belonging than in any other commercial establishment.

Today the great British pub ranks second or third in any survey of what visitors from abroad wish to experience when the go to the UK. And yet the pub is in crisis, with an average of 26 closing their doors for good every single week.

Against this backdrop, I wanted to tell the story of ‘one pub and everyone who has ever drank in it’, and the George emerged as the best candidate thanks to its unique combination of survival and location. There were perhaps more significant pubs historically, but they are no longer with us. And there are older pubs, but one reason they have survived is that they are tucked away in corners of the country where nothing much happens – meaning there is a less interesting story to tell.

The story of the George involves the three leading lights of English literature – not just Shakespeare, but also Chaucer and Dickens. The latter was definitely a regular at the George, but I have to warn readers that there is no firm documentary evidence that either Chaucer or Shakespeare definitely drank in the George. In Shakespeare’s case that’s because there’s hardly any documentary evidence of him doing anything at all. But circumstantial evidence that he drank in the George is very strong indeed.

As well as these guys, the story involves a wide-ranging cast of villains, prostitutes, beggars, thieves, merchants, brewers, highwaymen, prime ministers and royalty – making the George the perfect case study of the democracy and inclusiveness of the pub – qualities that make any obituary for pubs very premature indeed.

Shakespeare’s Local been my most successful book launch in the UK to date, having been serialised on BBC Radio 4 and included in several ‘best picks’ of books of 2012. It’s a book about pubs, but it’s my least beery book so far – it’s much more about broader social history, and aims to please a broader audience.

(Note to UK readers: the only things that have changed for the American edition are the cover and title and, I guess, maybe some Americanized spellings. In any and all other respects this is the same book as Shakespeare’s Local).

My previous books were way more beery. Last time I looked, aged ago, they were not available anywhere in the US, but I’m delighted to discover that all three are now listed on amazon.com at non-import prices, in paperback and kindle editions. For anyone not familiar with them, here is a brief recap:

My first book looks at the history of beer (and pubs) mainly from a UK perspective.  It’s still my bestselling book overall as it keeps up steady business as an easy, accessible, general introduction to the world of beer. If you’re a beer geek looking for something more thorough and rigorous, track down anything by Martyn Cornell, or check out the Oxford Companion to Beer. What I tried to do here is discuss beer with both the irreverence and respect it deserves, offering entertainment as well as education to anyone who enjoys a good beer, but still packing in enough historical fact and trivia so that even the most knowledgeable beer geek might find something knew not just about beer, but the context it sat in, why it was there and how important it was, and still remains. This edition was updated in 2010. When people ask me which of my books is best, I tell them this is the most popular.

Breaking out of my UK perspective, for my second book I went on a world tour of important beer drinking nations. At a time when the idea of ‘craft beer’ was really happening in the US but wasn’t that well known in the UK, I compared different brewing traditions, beer styles and ways of drinking, from Europe to the US, from Portland to Prague, from Milwaukee to Melbourne, Australia, including Paddys’ Day in Ireland, Oktoberfest in Munich, and around 500 bars across thirteen countries. When people ask me which is my best book, I tell them this is the funniest.

India Pale Ale is the flagbearer of the craft beer movement, the most popular beer style among beer geeks and brewers. Everyone involved in that scene knows the legend of the beer brewed to be shipped to British garrisons in India, and the supposed transformation it underwent on the voyage. But no one knew what really happened. My third book charts my attempt to take a cask of traditionally brewed IPA from Burton-on-Trent to Calcutta by its traditional sea route around the Cape of Good Hope for the first time in 140 years. It cuts between the most detailed history of IPA there is, and my own journey on a variety of vessels. It didn’t quite go according to plan. When people ask me which is my best book, I tell them this is the best-written.

So that’s how I spent the last ten years of my life. I’m very proud to have all four books now on sale in the US and I hope American readers can cope with the slang and English vernacular* and enjoy them as much as my British readers.

Cheers, America!

*And the irritating over-reliance on footnotes. 

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Come to dinner with India Pale Ale – 3rd December, Meantime Old Brewery

Barry the Barrel of IPA on his way to India. Or so he thinks.

IPA may be the most beloved beer style of craft brewers.  It may be the beer style that has driven the craft beer revolution around the world.  But it is also the most mythologised, debated, controversial and misunderstood beer style in the world.

Some people become incensed, possessed by violent rage, at what they perceive as falsehoods or inaccuracies in IPA’s history.

Others scream about commercial brands using ‘IPA’ in their name when they are not ‘proper’ IPAs.

When I discovered various new facets of the history of IPA while researching my book Hops and Glory, some people simply dismissed my claims out of hand if they didn’t fit with their own story, ignoring facts I had discovered from primary research among original nineteenth century documents.

IPA is a cipher for all the various points of view and debates within brewing and beer fandom.

But it’s also a spectacular beer style that has at some point inspired pretty much everyone who loves craft beer today.

So when Meantime Brewing asked me to host a beer and food matching dinner as part of a regular series they hold at The Old Brewery in Greenwich, and asked if I would perhaps like to do this with an IPA theme, I leapt at the chance.

IPA has been around for well over 200 years.  Over that time, it has evolved, as tastes and brewing techniques have evolved.  We can’t say exactly what old IPAs taste like but we can infer things from various surviving recipes, contemporary accounts and recreations.  What we may not consider to be a ‘proper’ IPA today may have been universally understood to be the only valid interpretation of IPA sixty or a hundred yeas ago.

English troops enjoying Bass IPA, Bengal, 19th century

So what we’ve attempted to do is compile a list of beers for a tasting and then dinner which reflect how the style has evolved over the years, decades and centuries, and how it has reached a point in the last decade or so where it has developed into an extraordinarily broad range of different tastes and versions. I’ll be talking about each beer and more generally about how the style has evolved.

It’s not meant to be a point scoring exercise or a workshop in coming up with the definitive truth about IPA.  It’s meant to be a thoughtful look at arguably the greatest beer style, and an awesome evening of beer and food flavours.  Here’s the menu:

The evening starts at 6.30pm on Monday 3rd December, at the Old Brewery in Greenwich.  Tickets are £50 per person which includes all beers.  As of now it’s about 75% sold out but you can buy tickets by phoning 0203 327 1280 or by going to the Old Brewery website here.

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Cheers to International IPA Day

What a great opportunity to take stock.  What a smart use of social media.

Two tweeters decided it might be a nice idea to get the online beer community to have a global celebration of the craft beer world’s favourite beer style, and the day was set for today, 4th August.

As far as I can tell there is no central organisational structure, no big budget or organisation, and yet it’s an idea that has caught the imaginations of beer lovers and gone global.

So what are we supposed to do?  What actually happens?  That’s up to you.  It’s up to breweries, pubs and drinkers to organise tastings, drinking, events, whatever really.  A quick google search shows that many people across the planet have taken up the challenge.

Why IPA?  It’s a perfect meme for every aspect of beer appreciation.  It’s a definable style – even though that definition mutates continually over time.  It has a long, deeply chronicled history – and that history has given birth to more myths, mythbusting, speculation, misinterpretation and debate than anything else in beer.  It’s a perfect showcase for hops – the facet of beer that craft drinkers get most excited about.  And it’s the style that caught the imagination of the US craft beer movement, that symbolises it.  It’s the constant across the many styles craft brewers brew, a shop window for their craft.  The union of a traditional old-style IPA recipe and the tropical orchard of flavours and aromas bestowed by New World hops lit a fire in craft brewing that’s now burning world over.

For me, my first taste of an American IPA was the equivalent of my first taste of a real curry: it was like tasting in colour for the first time, as if everything I’d tasted before was black and white.  From there it became an obsession that would profoundly change my life.  In 2007 I embarked on a mission to recreate IPA’s historic voyage from Burton to India around the Cape of Good Hope for the first time since 1869.  My attempt to recreate the effects of the journey was partially successful, as was my attempt to write the most thorough, detailed history of IPA to date.  Neither of these partial successes has stopped the arguments, the mythbuilding and busting, the speculation, and that’s entirely how it should be.

The resulting book, Hops & Glory, moved me up a big notch in my career, earned me the Beer Writer of the Year gong, and to date represents the best writing I can do.  I can never look at IPA the same way again.

Tonight, my contribution to the celebrations is that I’ll be tweeting from a 6-course IPA day feast at the Dean Swift, London SE1.  It’s a lovely little pub run by passionate, knowledgable people, and they’ve pulled together what looks to be an amazing menu, which I’m not allowed to share.  If you want to know how that goes, follow @PeteBrownBeer on Twitter from 7pm UK time.

And raise a glass to the world’s most talked about beer style, and the people who have harnessed the power of social media to celebrate it in such a great way.

I promise I will go back ranting and/or trying to be funny after this post.

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Hops and Glory and Jeff and Smuggling

***SPOILER ALERT***
If you STILL haven’t read Hops and Glory (what is wrong with you?) and you don’t want to know what happens, look away now.

If you have read it, you’ll remember that Barry the Barrel exploded in Tenerife, and I found myself in Brazil with a serious problem – how to get a replacement, pressurised keg into Brazil so I could board my container ship with it.  In the end I had to ask friends for a volunteer to smuggle it in in their personal luggage.

The man who stepped forward was Jeff Pickthall.  Risking time in a Brazilian jail (perhaps) he brought me the keg and enjoyed a few days in Brazil, after a nailbiting race against time to get to me before I had to board my ship.

Some people have asked if I was perhaps laying on the drama a bit thick, exaggerating just how tight it was to make the story better.  Ask Jeff, and he’ll tell you that, if anything, I downplayed it.

Except now you don’t have to ask Jeff because finally, a mere three and a half years after that fateful day, he’s written his own account of his cameo in Hops and Glory.

It’s an epic.  And it’s right here:
http://jeffpickthall.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-hops-and-glory-adventure-part-one.html

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The Book Tour That Wouldn’t Die

It’s deeply, deeply gratifying, but it seems that what began as a tour of readings and tastings to promote the release of Hops and Glory has become a semi-permanent, perpetual round of speaking and reading gigs.  That is so not a complaint – I love doing these events – I’m just surprised.

Anyway, this is just a short post to announce some events I’m doing between now and Christmas.  If I’m near you, please come along!

Tuesday 9th November (today!) – Fuller’s Brewery, 6.30pm
bengal Lancer on draught is this month’s seasonal from Fuller’s.  John Keeling will be giving a tutored tasting of the draught versus the bottled beer, and I’ll be telling the story of IPA, which is a lot more romantic but slightly less funny than the story behind the naming of the beer.

Friday 12th November – Westmorland CAMRA Beer Lovers’ Dinner, Kendal
Sold out

Saturday 13th November – Ulverston Brewery, Cumbria, 7.30pm
Exciting new Cumbrian brewery, already winning awards, Ulverston Brewing Company, The Old Auction Mart, Lightburn Road, Ulverston, Cumbria. Tickets from the brewery shop, 11am – 3pm, Mon – Sat.

Sunday 28th November – Amber Ales Brewery Tap – The Talbot Tap, Ripley, Derbyshire
This exciting new brewery loves hops and they’re having an IPA weekend, 25th-28th November, with a bunch of excellent different IPAs from around the UK and beyond.  I’m talking on Sunday at 3pm.  £6 ticket price includes a tasting flight of IPAs.

Sunday 5th December – Abergavenny Christmas Food and Drink Fayre
Not really book-related, I’ll be tasting Christmas beers and doing a bit of food pairing.  Ticket details will be on the website soon.

Thursday 16th December – The Greystones Pub, Sheffield, 7.30pm
The latest acquisition by Thornbridge, a pub in an affluent part of Sheffield that may well be Richard Hawley’s new local.  I’ll be tasting Thorndbridge beers and talking about the book.

See you there!

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Hops and Glory in Notting Hill

I’m doing a reading at the esteemed Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill, West London, tomorrow – Thursday 14th October.  Doors open, 6.30, we kick off at 7pm.

The talks I’ve been doing at festivals up and down the country have been getting bigger and bigger and selling out, which is deeply gratifying.  This is more intimate, and is the first one I’ve done in London for nearly a year.

As an added attraction, we have a couple of quite cool beers.  As the bookshop is on Fuller’s manor, I asked them if you would supply a couple of beers.  So we’re going to have Bengal Lancer to taste, and then, as we talk about how IPA aged, we’re going to illustrate this with the 2005 expression of Fuller’s Vintage Ale, which is drinking particularly well just now according to head brewer John Keeling.

All this for the measly price of £5!  Buy now from here (as I said, it’s an intimate venue) to avoid disappointment.

Hope to see you there.

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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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Come to my beer dinner, August 9th!

Thanks to my friend Niki, author of the fantastically successful Flavour Thesaurus, I was introduced to Dominique de Bastarrechea, who runs Hardy’s Brasserie and Wine Bar in a quiet corner of Marylebone.
Niki had done a very successful evening talking about her book, after which a meal followed based on some of the pairing suggestions in the book itself.
The event went so well Dominique wanted to do more, and Niki suggested me!  One blurry World Cup semi-final evening later, which was almost but not quite ruined by an exploding bottle of Worthington White Shield, Dominique was a beer convert, vowing to replace the perfectly acceptable but unimaginative selection of bottled lagers in the restaurant with a short but perfectly formed beer list that reflects the diversity and innovation of beer today.
She’s spent the month since then following a few recommendations of mine, visiting brewers and rapidly developing her own tastes and preferences with a work rate and dedication that’s inspiring and quite frankly a bit scary.
The result: this week if you go to Hardy’s you can vote for the new beer list.  We’ve got new lagers, fruit beers, wheat beers, pale ales, bitters, strong ales and porter/stout.  In each category there are two or three beers.  In each, the most popular will be kept on.  If they sell well, the list may then expand even further.  
So next Monday, I’ll be talking about beer and my books, and unveiling the winners in a tutored tasting. After that, there’s a three course dinner for the ridiculously reasonable price of £15.  Here’s the menu:
I’m going to be matching different beers with each dish and talking through the matches.
It promises to be a great evening – Niki’s event was an extraordinary success – so do book now if you think you’ll still have a liver left after this week!  Full details below.

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