Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week – even when we’re on holiday, apparently. This time, we’ve got UNESCO, green beer, and the absence of gammon at JDW.
First, a couple of related news stories: there are bids underway to secure UNESCO ‘intangible cultural heritage’ listings for both British cask ale and Czech beer culture. Belgian beer culture was listed in 2016, so there is precedent.
In practice, what does a listing mean? As far as we can tell, it’s mostly about awareness, and supporting further campaigning. It puts preassure on politicians to step up and protect listed cultural assets or, at the very least, not to be seen to be vandalising them. It’s about saying: “These things matter to the world, and you are being watched.”
At IrishBeerHistory Liam K has been exploring the strange history of Green Beer, which was briefly fashionable in London in the 1930s. As in, beer that was artificially coloured a “strong and clear green”:
One of the earliest mentions of this new beverage is The Yorkshire Post & Leeds Intelligencer in late October 1930… “As to the green beer, I have heard many descriptions of its peculiar and individual flavour, but to me it tasted just like any other sort of beer in spite of its lurid emerald colour. Brewed in Scotland, it is at present the monopoly of the proprietors of a restaurant in Bury Street, who ‘invented’ it…” Hardly a glowing or detailed review but it shows that it had certainly been around for a short while at this point, and a week or so later this new concoction appeared in the society pages of the London Weekly Dispatch when the author Arnold Bennett was seen “drinking the newest drink of all in a Bury Street restaurant – green beer”. The author, one John Grosvenor, goes on to state that the beverage “looks like particularly clear crème de menthe, and tastes like – beer, good beer.”
Anyone who has made beer part of their lifestyle and, dare we say, identity will read Vincent Raison’s piece for Pellicle with a sense of recognition – and perhaps unease. He’s been told to cut down on booze by his doctor but, to cut a long story short, doesn’t want to. He likes beer, and likes being in the pub, and is in the process of attempting to reengineer his lifestyle and habits:
The doctor gently suggested some lifestyle changes. More (or some) exercise. Improved diet. The usual stuff. Then she proposed I take three consecutive days off alcohol a week to avoid gout attacks and otherwise unnecessary medication… I have friends who have gone sober and are very happy about it, but that’s not for me, despite their increased vim and vigour. I needed a Third Way. A strategy for survival that still involves my beloved local pub… I began walking more, cutting down on delicious, empty carbohydrates and beautiful, calorific snacks. Fine. But the real challenge was not drinking from Monday to Wednesday.
The piece is also, somewhat incidentally, a portrait of a particular pub in South London, The Green Goddess, which sounds very much worth a visit.
The news that the Wetherspoon chain is tweaking its food menu might not seem, at first glance, to be especially interesting. For the Pub Curmudgeon, however, it highlights a fundamental feature of their business model: the willingness to adapt to market pressures to keep prices keen. In a lengthy post, he reflects on what makes Wetherspoon tick, and how it has risen to such prominence in British beer culture:
Wetherspoon’s have ended up reinventing the pub model from the ground up. The fundamental point is that the underlying cost assumptions of the pub trade should not be taken as fixed… This wasn’t something that was in place from the beginning. Tim Martin started out by converting former shops to offer something that most London pubs at the time didn’t – cask beer, food service, consistent opening hours and a comfortable, welcoming, unthreatening environment. In the early days, they weren’t markedly cheap compared with the competition. It wasn’t until the mid-90s that they started expanding outside their initial South-East base – the Moon Under Water in Manchester city centre opened in August 1995… But it is an approach that has evolved over time. Every aspect of the pub cost base has been challenged in the quest to make a lower margin viable.
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A while ago, Jeff Alworth at Beervana came across an unusual imported version of Mexican Corona lager that was possibly more ‘authentic’, and certainly better tasting. But he struggled to pin down the story behind this strange variant. Now, further fascinating details have emerged:
The label listed Oz Trading Group of Hidalgo, Texas as the importer, which was an oddly bold move for, to quote the economist Stringer Bell, “a criminal [expletive] enterprise”…. [Now] we finally have some resolution to the mystery: Constellation and Modelo are suing Oz… According to the case against Oz, the charge is counterfeiting… And the suit directly identifies the Corona Mega scam: “While Oz Trading reportedly withdrew its applications for the infringing labels, the lawsuit contends that the company continues to market and sell products that bear the Modelo trademarks, misleading branding, and false advertising…”
Jeff’s follow up questions are good ones, too, such as: “Why was the counterfeit beer so much better than Corona?”
Here’s a fascinating thing: at Beer & Brewer Jake Brandish has done his best to come up with a brew-at-home recipe for a clone of low-alcohol Guinness… although the message really seems to be “Don’t bother.” As in, brewing low alcohol beer is a considerable technical challenge, and the improved quality of modern LA beer is something of a marvel of the age:
When it comes to home brewing no or ultra-low alcohol beers at home, there are some areas of major concern. Some of the main reasons beer has become such a safe and relatively stable product are the low pH levels and the presence of ethanol. Both factors will keep most spoilage organisms at bay – most! At some point we have all done a bad batch or had a few bad bottles. Am I right? Yes, I thought so. Imagine what would happen in your bottled beer (with a high amount of residual sugars) if there wasn’t ethanol, or very little, to assist in killing these spoilage organisms. There is, however, a way around the risk of having bottles explode for home brewers, but you must be prepared to pasteurise your beer once it is bottled. This will mean heating up your HLT or kettle to 68°C and place your bottled beer in it for a few minutes to achieve the minimum amount of PU (pasteurising units).
Finally, from BlueSky, a post that made us slightly homesick for the UK…
Just huffed and puffed up a massive Yorkshire hill – BUT there was a beautiful Yorkshire pub at the top of it
— Will Hawkes (@willhawkes.bsky.social) April 9, 2025 at 9:04 PM
For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.
