The two leading trends in UK craft beer were prominent at this rebranded East London festival.
craft beer
Brew Day!… “Icon”
On Imperial Russian Stouts, art, truth and mystery.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Collaboration x Cannibalisation
The collaboration beer is a novel solution for marketing and distribution at scale―a challenge that used to necessitate ruthless consolidation.
Can We Read a Beer in the Same Way We Read a Book?
Beers have a discursive role in our cultural system. Let’s read them with all of our critical faculties.