Beer Compurgation

“Anyway, I hope you get this man. Hit me back, just to chat, truly yours, your biggest fan, this is Stan” The best thing about being an irregular pub regular is the relationship you build up with the staff that work in your favourite establishments. Hanging around the bar constantly has brought me friends, not just when they are behind the bar, but away from their work and mine. Some have moved on to ventures new. Some I am lucky enough to see under circumstances other than exchanging pints. But mostly it has brought me to new friends that I have found common ground with over a few pre-match beers . One such friend did his time working "hard" behind the bar whilst spending his free time learning from other breweries how to brew a bloody good beverage. Some led to the initial runs and collaborations under his initial gypsy brewery guise. Since then this has led to much bigger and internationally recognised brewing accolades. And to think I knew him when he ...

The more that we see beer enter the mainstream psyche the more that those around need to come up with new braggadocio tactics and techniques. The beer sellers need a niche and a marketing tactic. The beer drinkers need an angle to make their repetitive social media beer reviews stand out from the same photo filtered iceman beer pornography shared a thousand times. And we’ve found the answer: unfermented hop water. Somewhere we lost our way. Somewhere we pushed through the 22 mile pain barrier, made it to the finish line but forgot to stop running. We fixed the problem but went too far, like Father Ted trying to tap out a dent in a motor vehicle. Freshness became an issue. It became the talk of the town. The imported beers weren’t getting here quick enough and then were sitting on the shelf for years. We were drinking overhopped IPAs 18 months after they were bottled. We improved. We improved our import markets. We started cutting out Swedish or Dutch distributors. We had...