Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got tasting notes, Fibonacci numbers and cold beer.
We don’t do this often but we’re going to make ourselves the news item at the top.
If you want a rare opportunity to hear us speaking we’ll be at The Greenbank in Easton, Bristol, from 6pm next Tuesday, 24 June, telling the story of the evolution of the pub with reference to specific examples in Bristol. It’s part of a series of talks organised by local brewery Good Chemistry and the Drinking Studies Network.
Also on the bill is Dafydd Wiliam, Principal Curator of Historic Buildings at St Fagans National Museum of History, who will be talking about the re-building of The Vulcan Hotel. It’s free to attend and you can sign up to attend online.
How do you buy beer? You go into a shop, pick it up, and pay for it, right? Well, Sayre Piotrkowski takes these things more seriously than most and has started writing a guide on how to buy beer like a professional. The first part is up on Substack now and includes advice like this:
Check the date before you buy. It’s the only indicator of beer quality available to you before opening the can or bottle… Buy only cold-stored beer. Never buy beer that is not refrigerated. If your local shop doesn’t keep beer cold, find another retailer… Ask about backstock. Backstock refers to inventory that is not yet on the public-facing shelf. Most grocers do not refrigerate their beer backstock, but a handful of dedicated breweries insist on keeping theirs in dairy or floral fridges… Store your beer cold at home. No matter how much you love a particular beer, don’t buy more than you can fit in the fridge.
The latest entry in the ‘Is Adrian Tierney-Jones OK?’ series provides some evidence for the ‘Yes’ column. Unable to avoid overhearing a conversation about happiness in a pub beer garden got him asking whether he has ever been happy, and what happy might mean:
When was I happy? I thought back to my wedding day, the birth of our son, two instances when I could easily say I was happy, then without remembering specific instances I thought about times when the laughter of a child, the easy exchange of glances with a loved one, the sound of a cuckoo in a wood, the excitement and buffoonery of family dogs, the acceptance of my first journalistic review for the NME, the taste of the first joyous pint of the evening, the sight of a river flowing slowly and majestically through a small Czech town alongside which I sat in a bar adjoined to a local brewery…
Michael has begun channelling his blogging energy into the website for the Sheffield pub at which he works and it’s good stuff. His latest piece is about tasting notes and how, yes, we want them to be accessible and not too pretentious, but there’s a difference between that and being totally, uselessly generic:
Scanning through the taproom menu, I’m confronted with an ever revolving carousel of 5 words, in dizzying repetition. Citrus. Floral. Hazy. Tropical. Juicy. Citrus. Floral . Hazy, and so on… The purpose of written tasting notes shouldn’t necessarily be just to tell the reader what the product tastes like, it should be about helping them to choose which product they would like to drink, and the best way of doing this is by being specific. If a list of beers is simply recycling the same 5 uninspiring tasting notes in rote, then whilst you may be given a very loose idea of some of the flavours that may be present, after reading through the list, you are no closer to coming to a decision, as there is little in the way of differentiation.
If you’ve been involved in beer-related social media you’ve probably come across at least one enthusiastic post from globetrotting brewery ticker Chris O’Leary, AKA Brew York. He’s been profiled by Don Tse for Forbes magazine where he reveals some of the rules behind his mission, among other fascinating details:
Chris O’Leary of New York City has traveled the world visiting breweries. Today, he had a beer in his 3,806th brewery, one named Thirty Eight O Six Brewing, in Berwick, Australia… The sheer number of breweries O’Leary has visited is impressive, but he also makes a sport of visiting appropriate breweries… his 333rd brewery was Phase Three Brewing in Lake Zurich, Illinois… his 1,717th brewery was 1717 Brewing in Des Moines, Iowa (now closed)… and for the math nerds, his 1,235th brewery was Fibonacci Brewing in Cincinnati, Ohio.
We’re a little late to this story but for VinePair Josh Bernstein provides a great summary of what’s been going on with Newcastle Brown Ale in the past decade or so. We’ll be honest, we’ve struggled to keep track, partly because it’s a difficult beer to care about. But it’s good to know that it’s once again being produced in the UK, if not actually in Newcastle, to what sounds like a better recipe than 20 years ago:
Knowing better than to trust an anonymous internet commenter, I contacted Heineken to confirm. In spring 2024, Lagunitas shuttered its Chicago brewery, winding down domestic production of Newcastle Brown Ale… In 2019, Heineken shifted Newcastle production from the Netherlands, where it was made for export to America, to Lagunitas’s brewery in Chicago. To reignite flagging sales, Heineken tasked Lagunitas with reformulating the brown ale, incorporating citrusy Centennial and piney Chinook hops to appeal to contemporary craft beer drinkers… The revamped recipe was as well received as Crystal Pepsi. Newcastle Brown Ale fans weren’t clamoring for more hops, and most craft beer drinkers could care less about brown ales — especially during the height of the hazy IPA craze…
Finally, from social media, a depressing insight into the politics of managing a pub…
I know this is just part and parcel of running the pub I do, which is a pub I love but barring someone for being homophobic has led to a campaign against me being the manager by people who think they own the pub because they drink cheap lager in it, which is surprisingly effective in a local area
— Hazel Southwell (@hazelsouthwell.bsky.social) June 16, 2025 at 11:40 PM
For more good reading check out Alan McLeod’s round-up from Thursday and Jeff Alworth’s experiment with the form from Wednesday.
