The Session #86 - Beer Journalism, or The Inward Debate

Heather Vandenengel of Beer Hobo posits the question :

What role do beer writers play in the culture and growth of craft beer? Are we advocates, critics, or storytellers? What stories are not getting told and what ones would you like to never hear about again? What’s your beer media diet? i.e. what publications/blogs/sites do you read to learn about industry? Are all beer journalists subhumans? Is beer journalism a tepid affair and/or a moribund endeavor? And if so, what can be done about it?

I will never be a "serious" journalist.  Basically, I lack both persistence and the ability to cultivate people, which are essential characteristics of the breed.  People often say to me "It's easy to take the piss."  Yes.  Yes it is.  And that is why I do it.

I've often remarked that Beer as a subject is taken to be far too important by a lot of people.  Indeed, it is Serious Business, as TV Tropes would no doubt say.  My guess is that the few who make their living from Beer Journalism have what is called 'previous' in such things, whether running focus groups to help flog washing powder or plotting the Socialist Revolution.

Beer Writing, and it's assorted debates and controversies are the proverbial storm in a teacup.  Read any blog on the subject.  You will see the same names commenting on the posts and linking to their own blogs on the subject, where the same names you saw on the original will be doing the same.  Magic wheel keep on turning round, round, round, round.

I'm not dissing this kind of thing.  It's fun to read about things that interest you and talk about them with the like-minded.  But does any of it really matter?  Occasionally, some brewery or it's workers will get the shaft, some pub will close, some drinker will be served a murky pint at the local Spoons.  But as far as the regular drinker and the industry that serves him/her, nobody writing about it really matters.  Shit happens, and will continue to do so.

I like to keep informed.  I read the Morning Advertiser's website, plus the blogs listed to the left of here.  And like reading proper news sites, I find much of the information I read risible or faintly ridiculous.  Is there anything more ridiculous than a person who takes themselves seriously?  If people such as Martin Dickie, Ted Tuppen or Tim Martin didn't exist, you would have to invent them.  Well, I would, anyway.

All-in-all, this a poorly thought out and somewhat facetious plea for less seriousness in the Beer Writing World.  I guess to some people Beer is Important because it's so Trivial.  But it doesn't have to be that way.

Anyway, as per the request in the original article, I'm sharing a link to a piece of beer writing like what I think it should be.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you The Guide To Craft Beer At Your Local Bar.  I'm not saying it all should be like this, but it makes some important points in a witty and engaging way in between all the jokes.  And isn't that what "leisure activity" journalism should be about?

Craft in a Box

There have been ructions in Crafty Land in recent times.  Forked by the twin prongs of Wetherspoon's selling Sixpoint in cans and BrewDog promoting their own self-serving definition of "Craft Beer", the Crafties have been opining that Craft Ain't What It Used To Be.

But was "Craft" ever what it supposedly was?  The more self-conscious British microbreweries have taken their cues from The USA's craft scene.  Unfortunately, the typical American definition of a craft brewery would apply to every UK brewer from Greene King downwards.  Not the sort of image Martin Dickie and James Watt would want to promote.

Forget the "shedload of hops and made in buckets" type definitions - "Craft" is not really a style of beer.  It's nothing more or less than a marketing term.  Yes, the BrewDogs of this world want nothing else but your cash.  "Craft" is merely something they have seized upon to relieve you of it.  Needless to say they would be making Temperance Cordials or, god help us, Watney's Red Barrel if they thought they could make more money that way.

"Build Your Own Craft Bar Kit - only £250,000"

The whole Craft scene in the UK is startlingly uniform.  Ever been to a Craft Beer bar? All high stools, slate floors and reclaimed bricks (or in BrewDog's bars case, probably brand new bricks painstakingly chipped and randomly whitewashed to look reclaimed). These are the visual cues that tell you what to expect.  And you're all the better a person for enduring the discomfort for the sake of better beer.

"Craft" beer never was.  There is merely great,  good, ok, crap and awful beer.  The rest is just window dressing.

The Honest Opinion

I was in the pub the other day. Surprising, I know.  I was drinking my way as usual through the local microbrewed ales.  Once I got to the end of the pumps, the barman flipped around the (hitherto hidden) far pumpclip to reveal something called "Silver Lining".  It did not look too convincing, being as it was an faded inkjet catridge effort, laminated and roughly cut out.  This was, apparently, the Festival Beer of the Lancaster Beerfest.

"As the pub company's one of the Beerfest's sponsors, we've been told we have to have this on." winced the barman.  "Oh, and Fuzzy Duck have done it."

 Ah, Fuzzy Duck.  If ever there was a less hip Lancashire microbrewer, I have yet to see them.  Not content with the dubious spooneristically named beers, and Syd Little running their pub restaurant in Fleetwood, the damn duck on the pumpclip is, in fact, smooth.  Their beers do very well at Festivals though.  I can imagine someone with next-to-no beer knowledge entering the hall with the programme and being baffled by the choice of 100 ales.  Then his eyes alight on the entry for Fuzzy Duck's beers.  "Cunning Stunt!  Hur hur hur!" he will chuckle to himself, as he rewards himself with a pint of Poulton-le-Fylde's 'finest'.

Anyway, eventually the bloody Silver Lining had to go on, as two of the other beers ran out that afternoon.  I decided to order a pint of it due to lack of better options (to be fair I'd had six pints by now).  I tasted it.  Or at least I would have done if I'd been able to discern any flavour in it.  Full of watery goodness, I thought, as I tried to dispatch it with reasonable haste so as to be able to drink something better.

I was about halfway down when a group of four blokes entered the bar.  These, I was informed, were the organisers of the Lancaster Beerfest, out on the piss and (of course) checking the Festival Beer was being served.

"Anyone tried it, yet?" one of them asked.  The barmaid, well-meaning soul she is, pointed towards me.  "He ordered one a few minutes ago.".  Hmm.  Thanks.

"How are you finding it?" enquired Mr. Beerfest of me.  Well, I took a deep breath and gave (to my slight regret) My Honest Opinion.  "Well, I'm guessing I'm not really your market for this kind of beer.  I'm more into this stuff <pointing at the Hawkshead IPA>.  It's not horrible beer by any means, it's just that I prefer my beer with a bit more oomph.".

Mr Beerfest slunk away without reply.  "I think you've hurt his feelings" said the barmaid, just to make me feel better.  "But he did ask me what I thought, right?  And if you don't want to risk hearing something you don't like, then you shouldn't ask the question."  She didn't reply, but simply looked doubtful.

Was I wrong?  I tried my best.  I could have said "This beer is crap and I'm trying to finish it as quickly as possible.  I gave it a chance, but found it severely wanting".  But no, I tried to be diplomatic about it.  And anyway, it's not as if Mr. Beerfest brewed the beer himself.

So, should you really give Your Honest Opinion when asked by someone whether you think their beer is any good or not?  Answers on a postcard.  Or rather the comments section below.

Hoppier Than Hopf**k

"We only had enough hops for one pint, but we managed somehow"

"Please, if you're reading this, please send help. Something... something has gone terribly wrong. We tried to make something so hoppy it was hoppier than even a pile of hops. But we made something terrible. Something that's more monster than hops. We never meant for it to end like this. Blood. Blood and hops, everywhere. May God have mercy on us all."

From The Guide To Craft Beer 

I think it all started when a local barman told me about this beer he had at another pub in town.  It was, he said, a complete "hopfuck".  So off I went to the place and asked for the requisite name I was told.  Stone Ruination IPA it was called.  I handed over my £9 and was given in return a green bottle with tiny writing and a BrewDog half-pint glass.

And yes, reader, I was well and truly fucked by hops.

Despairing of ever being able to taste anything else for the rest of the day, I ordered a Fentiman's Vicky Lemonade, usually a desperate measure when I feel myself getting too pissed to order another beer.  I could barely taste a bloody thing.

You really do have to wonder sometimes.  Is there anything but hops in the Crafty world?  Woe betide the beer that makes claims of hoppiness on it's label that fails to meet the expectation of the Crafties, such as this review for Thwaites 13 Guns at CAMRGB.  But while the bottle labels have the self-conscious "Craft" design, they're aimed at the regular Premium Bottled Ale buyer, who would consider the likes of 13 Guns bloody hoppy if he usually drank Thwaites Original or Wainwright.

Reading through CAMRGB's reviews, you will struggle to find a beer given a half decent review if it isn't (a) a high ABV American-style IPA (b) an Imperial Stout or (c) a Saison.  Reading them, you have to wonder if the reviewer isn't suffering from a major case of palate fatigue, to which only ever increasing amounts of alpha-acids and hops can respond to and overcome.  Ironically, the few "regular" beers that get decent write-ups are usually described with the phrase "I liked this, but I don't know why."

Not being able to find my flannel shirt and flat cap, or grow a moustache fast enough, I decided to take drastic measures to avoid beer hipster ennui.  And I was saved.  Yes, saved. By Marston's.

:Luckily, a local shop was reducing the 5L fastcasks of Pedigree (they have a short shelf-life due to the "live yeast" they apparently contain), and picked one up at 80% off.  "I'd even drink Pedigree at £3.59 for nine pints of it", I thought.  The first couple tasted of nothing, but slowly my senses got used to Marston's BlandCask, and was having reasonable fun by it's eventual draining time two days later.  And it worked.  By Sunday, even Kirkby Lonsdale's beers tasted hoppy again.

Hops are good.  Hops provide a lot of the flavour in the vast majority of beers.  But are they the be-all and end-all of good beer? 

The Parody Account

Once upon a time, in a land far far away (in this case my bedroom), I created a Parody Twitter account.  I'm not a man for broad strokes.  I like the minutae of things.  So, my subject was a fictional whisky blender, Richard Proboscis, a wafer-thin spoof of real whisky blender Richard Paterson.  I got his posting style down to a tee, and recounted unlikely adventures of whisky-spilling and vociferous salesmanship.  Apparently, the people at Whyte & Mackay loved it, though Mr. Paterson himself was apparently slightly dubious.

I was possibly a bit sharp, but I don't think I was ever abusive or cruel.  And anyway, Mr. Paterson reduced his tweeting frequency and changed his style somewhat after a few months.  I do feel slightly guilty as I wonder if I was responsible for that.  I stopped posting to the account after three months, if for no other reason than it meant I ran out of material.

Which brings me to today's events.  Recently, an alleged spoof accout targeting famed beer bloggers Boak & Bailey has appeared.  I would post a link here, but it's likely the account will be deleted in the next few hours.  To say the output has been obscure and esoteric is putting it mildly.  Spurious ratings of blogs and non-sequiturs about online habits were the main topics.

But for some reason, today they have targeted the blameless Melissa Cole.  I'd love to be able to say the results have been needle-sharp, coruscating satire of beer bloggery.  I'd even love to be able to say it even turned the corners of my mouth up for a millisecond.  But sadly no.  It's been more along the lines of what the Daily Mail do to people they think their readers need to hate.  An unflattering photo here, thinly-veiled abuse there.  And always crying their rights in the name of freedom.

I appreciate that you get utter knobs on the Twitter as much as in the real world.  But the aforementioned knobs tend to use their psedonymity to avoid the  much deserved kicking they'd get in the so-called "real" world.

Freedom is a good thing, but how some people use it makes you despair

The Walkout

These days, the pub industry runs on a tight margin.  Stock levels are kept down during quiet times, expensive products are exchanged for cheaper ones, and most of all staff levels are cut as far as they can be.

Early January is always the slowest time of the year. My regular haunt has cut 16 hours off its trading time because, frankly, nobody is drinking on weekday afternoons.  Many places now only have one person on the rota most times. This can present certain difficulties, as I saw today.

I was in a different pub to usual, due to the usual place's aforementioned new opening hours. I was one of three customers there. The barman took a food order from the other two and disappeared into the kitchen to sort it out. Then the pub phone started ringing. It rang for over a minute, so it was presumably important.  Then another customer came to the bar. He saw nobody there. He waited 30 seconds and left. Potential trade lost.  The barman reappeared just as the door shut, but he wouldn't have known any of this.

This sometimes happens at my usual place, but as I know the staff there, I usually know what they're doing and can tell any waiting customers they'll get served in, literally, about one minute. They can then make up their own mind whether they want to stay. But what happens when there's no regular to explain this?

No, they will just bugger off and think "Well, not going there again".  So,  how can the customer be satisfied and the pub keep it's staffing rota balanced for trade? In my opinion, it can't. These two desires cannot meet in the middle, and a certain amount of potential trade will always be lost.

But the thing is, the pub will never know how much it's losing...

The Point Of CAMRA

I've been wondering about this for some time.

RedNev writes here that beer festivals, and especially CAMRA ones, are entering a new age of commerciality what with their charging a £7 entry fee and going to online ticket selling.  While this begs the question what the funds raised by this, and more to the point any surplus after venue fees and beer cost, go towards, I've been asking myself recently : What is CAMRA FOR in 2013.

The 1970s battle has been won.  Real Ale has been saved, and there are now hundred of breweries in the UK making it; <checks watch> possibly even thousands by now.  Though certain CAMRA branches (mine included) still believe big brewers want to rip out all the handpumps and make us all drink Watney's Red Barrel again, I don't think this will happen somehow.

In my experience, there is a certain suspicion amongst licensees about CAMRA's members' motives.  In another town (and another branch), one landlord said to me "Oh, you're in CAMRA, are you?",  and tried to get me to vote for his pub at the next committee meeting.  "The bastards only vote for <pub name removed>, as they give them the biggest discount.", he complained.  I didn't have the heart to tell him that even if I did have any influence with the Beard Club, I certainly didn't have any round here.  I was told similar things by other landlords in the same town, such as "They whinge about pub closing, but all they want is money off their next pint."

It could be that, for the vast majority of members, the discount is the main reason for joining CAMRA. What percentage of the membership is involved in actual "campaigning", rather than thinking of it as a money-off club with a free quarterly magazine?  My guess is in single figures.  CAMRA publicity material flaunts its 150,000 strong cohort, but usually only uses it as a tool to gain influence.  "Look at how many of us there are supporting real ale", it seems to say, despite the fact that few of them do more than simply buying it.

Maybe CAMRA should change its emphasis to supporting the suffering pub trade, or providing a voice against the increasing demonisation of public alcohol consumption.  If it doesn't find a distinct role, it could become an increasing irrelevance, populated by a silent membership whose sole reason for joining is the Wetherspoons tokens.