Staying "true"

Following HardknottDave's shock Craft apostasy, we're pleased to confirm that all our beer is now, as it has always been,

Bad Taste in Mouth

We popped into a CAMRA BF recently. One of our beers on so I thought I'd check it out. Nice to see it was on handpull.

But, oh dear, what's this? An unpleasant musty taint. "Right" says I, "I'll have a taste of that from the tap - not from the pump - if you don't mind" (I'm wearing one of our excellent T-shirts so it looks like I might be the brewer or something). And sure enough, it's the pump that's tainted, not the beer. I point this out. The clip is turned round. I retire. Fuming a little.

In a little while, a festival organiser strides over to me bearing two glasses. "Here", he says, "One from the pump - one from the tap". I gather it's some sort of test. I sniff, I sip. I firmly thrust the tainted one in his direction. "That one. Take it away."

Becky couldn't even take a sip.
Another brewer remarks that the beer smells to him like fresh trout. Not fishy. Earthy.
We discuss the earthy flavour of trout. He frowns when I mention eating stocked rainbow, as he fishes the rivers for the l'al brown jobs. I gather I'm a trout pleb. Or he's a trout snob, or something.

Over the next half hour I'm regaled with accounts of how thoroughly the pumps (which spend a lot of the year in storage) have been cleaned. And how carefully the beer is checked before connecting it to them.

Meanwhile there's a certain amount of checking from the pumps going on. A few more pumps are found to be tainted, and replacements rounded up. There's a couple of beers that won't be going on this evening, but all should be well the next day.

So, what shall we take home from this?

1. The musty taint that can build up in beer engines and lines can be difficult, or impossible, to remove by normal cleaning. These flavours have their source in bacterial (or fungal) growth and are detectable and offensive at homeopathically tiny (parts per trillion) levels. The chemicals responsible - geosmin, trichloranisole and others, seem to migrate into and through many plastics. So cleaning the surface - the inside of a pump or tube - might give you temporary relief, but a reservoir of taint lurks in the mass of the material to slowly diffuse back to the surface and into the contents. If the outside of plastic tube is contaminated, the mustiness will pass right through into the beer.
 We touched on this all some time ago.

 2. While the threshold for these off-flavours is very low, there's a wide range in individual sensitivity. If you're tasting beer for any purpose other than your own enjoyment you'll want to be sure that you're at least as sensitive as the bulk of drinkers.

3. Cleaning (pumps and lines) is not a magical operation.  It's a rational process that's easy to measure. Just having performed line cleaning does not of itself guarantee that the lines are fit for use.

4. Festival organisers - check the beer you're actually serving. Sure, don't put it on a pump until it's been checked at the tap.  But do check what's coming out of the pump. Every session.

5. Festival organisers - it's not neccessary to administer taste tests to brewers. Beer is what we do for a living. You're the amateurs. In the nicest possible way.

New look for beer? Really?

This'll be copyright the very lovely Tring Brewery

You may have seen something about this recently: "It is believed that Tring is the first brewery in the UK to use applied colour psychology, and to recognise the importance of colour in influencing emotion, mood and behaviour. " Well, hardly. But we'll let that pass.

You can read the press release here:http://siba.co.uk/2013/07/tring-brewery-taste-aroma-and-now-applied-colour-psychology/

Here's some "genuine" colour psychology for you - actual research rather than the opinion of some hippy. (and I'm not branding the no doubt enormously talented folks at KM Design a bunch of hippies - Tring clips are their work)

You ask a giant load of people to tell you how strongly they associate given words with particular "emotions". At the same time, you ask them if they associate any colour with each word.  Do your stats and you can have a go at figuring out what colours they're associating with "angry" words, "sad" words etc.

Colour signature of emotive terms: percent of emotive terms associated with each colour. For example, 32.4% of the anger terms are associated with the colour red.

Source: Crowdsourcing the Creation of a Word–Emotion Association Lexicon
Saif M. Mohammad and Peter D. Turney
Computational Intelligence, Volume 59, Number 000, 2008
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~saif/WebDocs/TechRep-MohammadTurney-CI.pdf

It might be a bit of a leap (and my sincere apologies to the authors) to go on to wonder what this means for our marketing effort here in the happening world of beer. And this is only the opinion of some hippy (me).

I guess we wouldn't mind having our customers feel trust, anticipation and joy when they see our point of sale - so let's go for white and green - perhaps throw in blue and yellow.

Since we're not going for anger, sadness, disgust and fear, let's avoid black and red. So not much hope for Tring's "Colley's Dog" there.

Incidentally, brown seems to be a boring colour (with negative hints), doesn't it? I wonder what that means for the awesome world of beer.

On still having change for the tram home.

Of course, when I was a lad...etc.

Data here.

Tho' 2/3 of people believe that drinking out is too expensive...

And according to research by Mintel, £4.4bn a year less money is being spent in pubs now than five years ago -  around £80,000 per pub (even with 6,000 fewer pubs).
(As reported by PMA editor Rob Willock.)

So, is it a bubble?

Well, I don't know. It's easy to see a bubble in retrospect, but rather harder before the fact.

It does look like there's a steep climb in new starts without any real market justification (that I can see).

And of course, the quaffale numbers aren't claimed definitive.

But you should see the most excellent Quaffale site for more info.

Update:

Oh Piss.  The late Simon Johnson beat me to this graph 6 months ago, his here: http://i528.photobucket.com/albums/dd323/haddonsman/brewery_zpsdaf90b09.jpg

Another Update: Some important dates for consideration when looking at these wiggly lines:
1979 Birth of what will become firkin chain (Bruce's Brewery)
1988 Firkin chain acquired by Midsummer Leisure
1991 Firkin taken over by Allied Lyons (and expands)
1993 (I think) All those little cellar tanks taken out (and sold 2nd hand)
1989 - 2003 Beer Orders in force (I think)
1999 Punch sells off 110 firkin pubs.
2002 PBD introduced.
2009 UK base rate goes down to 0.5%

And Another Update: According to Quaffale, of the 585 breweries opened since (including) 2009, 127 (21.7%) are brewpubs.

Truth in Advertising.

Lest we forget...

 BrewDog is a post Punk apocalyptic mother fu*ker of a craft brewery. Say goodbye to the corporate beer whores crazy for power and world domination. Swear allegiance to the uncompromising revolution. Taste the hops, live the dream. Learn to speak beer, love fruit and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, movers and warriors - the outlaw elite. Ride toward anarchy and caramel craziness. Let the sharp bitter finish rip you straight to the tits. Save up for a Luger, and drill the bastards.

"It wasn't removed because of them [the ASA], we just happened to be switching up the website content."

And, as someone else wrote:
"its great people have got that much time on their hands to report companies over insignificant things like language on a website"

Crikey, who would do such a thing?

A later clarification:

"because we needed to make room to talk about our Equity for Punks offer"
Ah, gotcha.

A musing on the latest Brewdog Crowdfunding effort.