Booze: The Session #69 - Perfect Beer World
This months session is hosted by Jorge at Brew Beer and Drink It and he wants to know what we'd like to see change in order to bring us closer to a perfect beer world.
Honestly, I forgot about The Session until I saw someone share their post on twitter. I was meant to post something entirely different and music related today but I guess that'll have to wait because, living in the UK there's certainly a lot to be said.
Like any British person will probably tell you, the main issues in the beer world are these:
THE BEER DUTY ESCALATOR:
For people from elsewhere in the world, basically, the beer duty escalator means that duty (tax) on beer will rise by 2% above inflation every year. Pubs are closing rapidly because of this. For instance, here in Norwich we used to have a pub for every day of the year. We had more pubs per square mile than any other UK city. Now, I can't find an exact figure but I can tell you that it is significantly less than 366. Not enough people are drinking in pubs because of this, because of the fact that now, in Norwich the average price of a pint is probably about £3.20 whereas if you buy multipacks from a supermarket, it'll be about 80p a pint. People just stay in. Yesterday a shockingly low number of MPs gathered in Parliament to debate whether to stop the Beer Duty Escalator. I listened to the whole thing. If the BDU was to be scrapped, it would save 5000 jobs in the first year alone... scrapping it is what the economy needs. It'll make everyone happy.
CASK VS KEG:
To this, I want to politely respond with a swift "Fuck off". I don't care. Why do people care? If we stop arguing about dispense and drink the fucking beer everything will be fine. CAMRA is all up in this bitch saying "Keg is evil because the beer is all filtered and pasteurised" and keg purists are like "Cask beer is dirty because it's fined through fish guts". Please fuck off. Shut the fuck up. Stop fucking arguing. If you don't like the dispense method, don't drink the cunting beer. Just stop trying to make it out that if someone drinks beer dispensed via the 'wrong' method they're the spawn of Satan. Just everyone shut the fuck up and have a fucking beer.
THE DEFINITION OF CRAFT:
Again, a swift "Fuck off" would suffice but I always have too many words. Expand: Christ Almighty; take the fucking hint from my first point. I don't care. Why do people care? Beer is beer is beer. You'll get some who will argue that craft always means keg. Does it? No. Fuck off. Shut the fuck up. Stop trying to define what craft means. To me, the word craft reminds me of when I was in first school. Craft hour where we'd make shitty fucking cards for our parents by gluing pasta and glitter to a piece of paper. "Look what I did, mummy!" "Oh, Nathaniel, that's wonderful" when you know inside she was thinking "This looks really fucking shit". You can't say what you really think to a child. I guess a lot of breweries that define themselves as 'craft' are quite similar to craft hour at school, in the sense that instead of glueing pasta shapes to paper, they like to shove random shit in beer and shove beer in barrels and they're like "Look what I did, beer drinkers" "Oh, brewery, that's wonderful" when a lot of us are probably thinking "Why the fuck have you even done that?" but a lot of people feel that they can't say that to a brewery because, really, they are our small Children. Basically, if you are defining yourself as craft, just don't and this arguement will be all over and we can just have a beer. You may be craft but saying you're so just causes arguements.
Just these three things would be a great start. Just three fucking things. Three simple things. Well, the first point may not be simple but the others are; aren't they?
To sum it up:
If you argue against scrapping the beer duty escalator, fuck off.
If you argue that either keg or cask is better, fuck off.
If you're still trying to define craft, fuck off.
It's all getting old and not doing us any favours.
Nate
http://www.twitter.com/NateDawg27
http://www.facebook.com/BoozeBeatsBites
Comments
Post a Comment