News in Brief #12

Craaaaaaaaaaaaft

Regional Brewery Condemns Microbrewery Sector

Colonel Lehybison-Smythe, Chairman of mid-size manufacturer of vaguely flavoured brown fluids Lehybison's Brewery has slated the nation's small brewers for making his life difficult.

"How dare they," lambasted the Colonel "pay less duty just because they're based in tin sheds rather than purpose built buildings with up-to-the-minute brewing equipment.  It's almost as if they think being in the beer business is harder work for them because they don't have an estate of pubs and an extensive free-trade network.  As such they can sell their beer cheaper than me. How can we compete with their obviously unfair advantage?"

"I knew it would end like this. The bastards have forced brewers like Lehybisons to make beer that tastes of something. Last week we were forced to treble the hopping rate from one to three cones per 100 barrel batch. And we had to put a packet of Hobnobs in it so we could call it 'Craft' "

"The sooner the whole Craft thing comes to an end, the happier I'll be."

Typical beer and typical drinker from the Press Association

Stock Photo Guy Raking It In

The pint-drinking man in the photo you see in every single beer and pub related article on major news websites has revealed his burgeoning wealth due to the ever-expanding coverage of the industry.

"It's great." said Nigel Hulton-Getty, formerly a random bloke at the nearest pub to a stock photo agency "I get a royalty of 1p for every 10,000 unique loads of that pic . Recently, there was an article on the Telegraph website about Evil Binge Drink Britain, which netted me a grand. Two days later, BBC Online did something about alcohol consumption plummeting over the last decade in the 18-30 age group. Got £1300 for that. Top stuff."

Asked what he spends the cash on, Hulton-Getty told us "Well,  not on beer, old boy. The stuff's filth."

"The photo was posed, you know. I spat it out afterwards."

It's meant to taste like that. No, honest, it really is

Gose "Plot to Exploit Crafties"

Newly fashionable beer style Gose has been revealed as a scam to extract money from novelty-desperate craft beer fans.

"It didn't start out that way." pleaded desperate German brewer August Sauerscheiss "We also make sausages and one day the head brewer was drunk, and dropped the entire batch of seasonings into the copper by mistake. After brewing it up, we decided to sell it anyway, even though it tasted like alcoholic seawater. It's not our fault if a load of hipsters declare it the greatest thing ever and force us to continually brew it."

"Not that we're complaining. This is the best brewing con since that large batch of Kristallweizen went cloudy and sour due to infection and we invented 'the Saison'."