On Imperial Russian Stouts, art, truth and mystery.
Breweries
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.
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 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.
On Clones, Colour and Cassonade
One of my Pursuit of Abbeyness XII brew-day posts received a spike of traffic from the Homebrew Talk forum. I went and eavesdropped on the discussion.
A Multitude of Sins
London’s Beavertown Brewery celebrated its seventh birthday with seven collaboration beers. Here’s what I thought about them.
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.
Economy of Means
Craft has an economics, and therefore it has an ethics, and those ethics are grounded in the economy of means. So what to make of a craft beer that feels like a triumph of rigmarole over substance?
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.
