On Imperial Russian Stouts, art, truth and mystery.
Beer Culture
Peak Craft
Derbyshire’s Peak District is dotted and surrounded by every species of brewery, but you are as likely to see their beers in the wild as you are to see a goshawk hovering over the park’s beautiful but scarred hills.
Think Bubbles and Spacetime Foam
The foam of my beer tells the unfinished history of this universe, from Big Bang to self-reflection to the final pop of maximum entropy.
The Benevolence of the Brewer
An invisible hand guides Adam Smith to the shade of Saint Sixtus Abbey.
Tied Up in Notts
Taking in the Nottingham Craft Beer Festival, the absurdly-named hype-generating machine that is Neon Raptor Brewing, and the absurdly-built Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem Inn.
The Golden Ark
In the Noah Man’s Land between inner-city bar and country inn, between craft cool and cask cosiness, floats The Golden Ark, one of London’s newest micropubs.
Last Orders
Bottle shops liquidating? A microbrewery in a football stadium? The cycle has peaked and the bell is ringing.
The Facticity of the Barrel
If the en soi of a Bourbon barrel constrains the pour soi of the beer that is geworfen into it, the culture of a wild beer is the nothingness—the incipient, the contingent—that creates a space for the transcendence of foeder-facticity.
A FSTA Buck
Asahi’s acquisition of London’s iconic Fuller’s brewing business had a shocked beer world searching for explanations last Friday. But the explanation is simple: this is a once-in-a-generation offer that Fuller’s board would have been negligent to turn down.
Gratitude, Alienation and Taprooms
The brewery taproom is one of the temples in which we gather to say a secular grace, in a ritual designed to alienate ourselves from our true sense of alienation.