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Selected Readings: March

Another month gone, and another month that left some interesting stuff to read and think.

We open the roundup with Boak&Bailey urging everyone to give yeasts the respect they deserve. There are brewers today that proudly announce what sort of hops they've used and (considerably fewer) others that every now and again tell us about the malts, but hardly anyone says anything about yeasts. Could it be that their names many times resemble post codes?

This English couple completely changes the subject with this sort of open letter to the owners of a restaurant who put a lot of care into every detail until they come to the beer selection, that is. Change a few names and cultural references and they could easily be speaking about Prague, where most restaurant critics still don't give much of a toss about beer and the high priests of the local gastronomy want to sell us pseudo-Belgian crap as something "gourmet", which brings me to Alan's nagging. Most of the celebrity chefs and other similar famous gastronomic faces seem to speak about beer only when some brewer or distributor pays them and not because they are really interested in the beverage. Examples abound.

But let's go back to beer. Ron Pattinson proves how ridiculous the idea many have of styles as something immutable with the presentation of the "same" beer brewed according to recipes from the 1830's and the 1940's.

Meanwhile, Velký Al, tells us about his experiment of drinking the same beer in six different glasses, interesting conclusions that leave the door open to debate.

And speaking about interesting, what better than this music and beer pairing at Birraire, well written and fun to read.

Stephen Beaumont learnt something from the super villains of the beer world, AB-InBev, the real reason why drinking from the bottle isn't good. It's not the first time I've seen a macro doing something to enrich beer culture, unfortunately, there are still people who dismiss that as "marketing bollocks". Of course, craft brewers would never think employing the dark arts of marketing, they are all like the Harry Potters of the industry....

The bollocks of the month goes to SAB-Miller, who whines that Heineken and Modelo will not let them into the Mexican market. Something they would never, ever, ever even consider doing elsewhere. Maybe they could join forces with with the people that are already fighting for this.

Na Zdraví!

Travel to the Czech Republic and stay at the best Prague Hotels

Comments

  1. Innocents that we are, we really hadn't considered before posting that the secrecy about yeast might be because so many are using the same few off the shelf.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. But wasn't that the case until not long ago with hops? And then some brewers started using different hops to make "familiar" beers style-wise, and the rest is history. I bet that 10 years ago, hardly any English drinker knew what Challenger or Amarillo were...

      Perhpas Wyeast and White Labs should come up with cool, hip names for their products :)

      Delete
  2. Yeah, people would scream happily here to read on label...we used dry yeast:)
    Honza, CzBeer.cz

    ReplyDelete

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