Beer Haiku Friday and Saving the World with Beer

Today's haiku is from Captain Hops and makes a cogent plea for sensible economic policies towards a better world. It is called "Fair is Fair":

Beer costs much more than
it did just a year ago.
I need a bailout.

Glass Tip: Beer Haiku Daily

Over at the Malthouse blog, the latest entry looks at creationism, Al Gore, environmental doom, recycling and Fair Maiden Pale Ale. It is titled "Saving the World with Beer":

Predictions of the world’s imminent demise began about a week after the world was created. The exact date of creation was either millions and millions of years ago or 4004BC, probably around noon, depending on who you believe. Despite the fact that the planet has patently not been destroyed even once, end-of-the-world theories have been consistently popular.

Brew recalls drop which spruced up Cook's crew

During a visit to Dusky Sound in Fiordland I found the creek from which Captain James Cook's crew drew the water for the first beer made in New Zealand shortly after the Resolution sailed into the sound early in 1773.

Cook had 7300 litres of that aboard on his first voyage. He took a supply of the leaves away with him from Dusky Sound to make spruce beer during the rest of his voyage.

His beer was thus not only the first in New Zealand but the first to be exported.

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Beer Haiku Friday and a new Beer Blog

One of the highlights of the sporting year is the Super Bowl but few would have predicted Arizona and Pittsburgh would be fighting out the final. I will be supporting the Cardinals which will probably ensure the Steelers take the win. Still, it will be a great occassion to enjoy with beer and burgers. Captain Hops has written a haiku about it called "Gladiators":

Battle for glory
In comfort, I watch, amused
Toasting the victors

Glass Tip - Beer Haiku Daily
Daniel Bradford is the publisher of All About Beer magazine. He has started a blog about his year-long bid to become an expert on beer and judge at the Great American Beer Fest. Should be a great read. The blog is called "Bradford on Beer" or BOB.

How Fringe is Becks? (love the irony)

There is little more an artist loves than to see their work plastered all over the city and there's a chance they can do so with this year's Fringe Festival.

But wait, there's more! The winner also gets a Beck's-tastic prize pack courtesy of Beck's, including 4-dozen Beck's, a Beck's shirt, Beck's hat, Beck's bag, Beck's USB stick and a Beck's bottle-opener to crack into the delicious beer.

Participants need to conjure up their own original poster design for the 2009 New Zealand Fringe Festival. It can be anything their imaginations spit out, as long as it also includes the Fringe 09 and Beck's logos, which can be downloaded at www.fringe.co.nz

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Beer Haiku Friday - Couldn't wait

Beer Haiku Friday is always on the cutting edge of current events so here is a haiku about Christmas. It is called "Couldn't Wait":

Before the sun rose
I snuck down to the tree and
Drank all my presents.

Beer Tip - The festive fellows at Beer Haiku Daily

Small breweries work to improve their game

Arrow Brewing has just been established in Arrowtown by four partners, and head brewer John Timpany says he is having trouble keeping them out of the place.

Set in The Oaks in a mall in the town centre, the brewery-pub offers several of its own beers plus Dunedin-based Emerson's and Christchurch-based Wigram Brewing as well as wines and pizzas, pies and filled rolls.

The brews are on tap, with no plans to bottle - although future wider distribution in kegs is possible.

"It is hard to make a beer that pleases everyone," Mr Timpany says, and he wants to therefore produce a wide range of different-tasting beers.

Tasting trays are available at The Oaks: they are a good way of finding a brew you prefer.

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Beer in the New Yorker

One of the best beer articles I've read in a while appeared in the most unlikely source - The New Yorker.

"A better brew: the rise of extreme beer" by Burkhard Bilger covers drunken elephants and the foundation of Dogfish Head brewery - and that's just page one.

Sam Calagione was used to odd suggestions from customers. On Monday mornings, his brewery’s answering machine is sometimes full of rambling meditations from fans, in the grips of beery enlightenment at their local bar. But Gasparine’s idea was different. It spoke to Calagione’s own contradictory ambitions for Dogfish: to make beers so potent and unique that they couldn’t be judged by ordinary standards, and to win for them the prestige and premium prices usually reserved for fine wine. And so, a year later, Calagione sent Gasparine back to Paraguay with an order for forty-four hundred board feet of palo santo. “I told him to get a shitload,” he remembers. “We were going to build the biggest wooden barrel since the days of Prohibition.”

Glass Tip - Barrie Osborne, producer of Lord of the Rings and the most famous person to do a Wild about Wellington boutique beer tour

The "Beer Necessities" Controversy

The annual "Beer Necessities" survey run by Wellington's Capital Times generated a great deal of controversy on the Real Beer Forums. Editor Aaron Watson, who was one of the panel of the judges, has responded strongly in his latest column:

Perhaps the comment that saddened me the most was the suggestion craft brewers boycott the event in the future.

That is a petulant remark that is short-sighted on two levels.
Firstly, how could it help beer and brewers to remove from the public eye one of the few independent surveys – not a competition – of the state of the beer nation? Answer: not at all.

Hop Rocker?

Buy Now

WELLINGTON BIGGEST BAR GOES BROKE AND OTHER RESTAURANT GOSS

We have it on good authority that DB stepped in and dealt a death blow to what was arguably Wellingtons biggest Bar - the Temperance complex. this morning. It was viewed as an ambitious complex by Wellingtons hospitality industry. It's fit out was estimated to be around $3 mil. DB and the Wellington Rugby Union were significant investors. Everyone is asking what Wellington Rugby is up for after the bars and restaurants failed to make good. Sad really - it would have been good to see it take off but we understand that fit out, cost overruns and very high rents meant it was an intemperate investment from day one.

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Price war flattens beer profits

The price war for packaged beer has become so intense that between them, brewers and supermarkets missed out on a whopping $66 million in the past year, DB Breweries says.

The two big brewing companies DB and Lion are now planning price rises this year of five percent and up to 10 per cent respectively.

Despite significant inflationary pressures, primarily raw material costs and wages, the price of supermarket stocked beer has stayed stagnant for well over a decade, with DB's promotional price range for mainstream beer the same today as it was 15 years ago.

In theory, a brewer needs to increase its price by a percentage that recovers input cost increases and protects existing margins, but at present input costs are rising much quicker than selling price increases.

Mr Blake estimates that raw material costs for malt, sugar, glass and aluminum have risen between 10 percent and 70 percent in the past year alone, while rival Lion has pencilled in a seven percent cost increase for 2009.

DB's beer prices went up by 5.5 percent in July, partly due to the annual excise tax increase, although many supermarkets absorbed the rise.

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Flat beer market forces innovation

"Healthy beer. It's almost a contradiction in terms."

(typical first sentence for a New Years alcohol story by NZ Herald. Come on guy why not surprise us with something original and positive, don't you drink beer?)

"The battleground has now shifted to a subset of the health and wellbeing category, the low-carb beer market. Right now, the New Zealand low-carb market is well, small beer, making up just 1 per cent of the $1.4 billion retail beer market.

But it is also the fastest growing, with year-on-year growth of around 20 per cent since Australian brewer Carlton introduced Pure Blonde to our shores in 2005."


(Hello people!! 1 per cent of the market, with 20% growth, then on the 1st January 2010 the article will be able to say that it has grown to 1.2% of the market.)

ATTENTION: Errol Kiong

A MORE INTERESTING STORY WOULD BE ABOUT THE 50 INDEPENDENT CRAFT BREWERIES THAT MAKE UP 2.5% OF THE $1.4 BILLION RETAIL BEER MARKET. DID YOU KNOW THAT THAT IS 250% LARGER THAN THE LOW CARB PART OF THE MARKET!?!?!

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(Hey Errol, you might want to have a read of this to get the other point of view)

Beerly Blogging on New Year's Day

[Delay in appearing thanks entirely to Blogger time out issues...]

Former Mac's head brewer Colin Paige continues to chronicle his Vietnam adventures with his latest post "Lost in Translation":

Half the time you’ll still wonder what the hell the translation means.
However as we have been finding out… if you’ve had a particularly humourless day, it may well be worth perusing the “English” menu before making your order with the waiter from the locals’ menu.

From Pete Brown's excellent blog (officially the second best beer blog in Britain), Pete takes a look back at the past year in a post modestly titled "2008: what the blazes was THAT about":

MY PERSONAL BEER LOW POINT OF THE YEAR
Winner: Having a very exciting meeting with a development producer from ITV where we agreed in principle to develop an idea for a series that would see me going around Britain investigating different regional beer styles and stories. Then reading THE NEXT DAY the announcement that Oz Clarke and James May were filming the same idea.