Brewdog and The Independent: Extreme Beer and Extremely Poor Journalism

Feisty beer-makers Brewdog have made themselves another enemy, blandsheet newspaper The Independent. Now perhaps sharing an office with The Daily Mail has unaligned the chakras of this previously mild bunch of hacks but it does seem that someone has micturated in their skinny lattes.

So in this article under the attention grabbing, Google-snagging, and largely unsupported by quotes headline of Health fears over 'extreme beer' craze, they set their soy-milk fed attack dog (answering to the name of Martin Hickman) on those scamps at Brewdog, Otley, Thornbridge Hall and Dark Star.

However what remains of their poor old subs desk don’t seem to have been quite on message with this crusade against slightly strong(er) beer for slightly young(er) people and so have left the piece riddled with errors, from the misspelling of Adam Withrington’s name to failing to correct Alcohol Concern's miscalculating of the alcohol content of a 10% beer in units.

Strangely the loudly bugled health fears never actually materialise in the copy and especially not in the form of a quote from anyone within the medical establishment. As for the craze element of that headline, only one of the ales listed in available in supermarkets while the rest are mostly sold in pubs or via the dusty shelves of a few specialist retailers, where they are ‘boldly marketing’ apparently, through labels, on their bottles. However some credit must go to the gluten-free Martin Hickman though, as both of the other elements of the headline - ‘over’ and the reported speech ‘extreme beers’ are 100% correct.

As usual proper beer writer Pete Brown makes sense of it all with a clarity and purity that shames the words that tumble out of here, so please go read this walking wall of common sense’s rebuke to the Indy here.



Go on, there is nothing else here.




Honest.

CAMRA’s Roger Protz strops over Oz and James

Oh dear. King CAMRA and former Swoppie Roger Protz, has gone a bit Daily Mail.

For in his latest blog post all the toys have departed the CAMRA pram. And the reason? Oz Clarke and James May’s continued failure to talk about his organisation on their contrived, hideously overstretched and somehow one-dimensional exploration tour of Britain’s booze culture.

Yes, the programme is frustrating with its endless edit-suite padding and caricatured voice-overs from the all-knowing smugster versus the hairest dolt in town. It has also lasted longer than the Hundred Year’s War and yet has somehow surfed along the details like an un-briefed minister unwittingly rolled into Paxman’s thousand-yard stare.

The tone of the piece is grating but to write “I repeat, Camra is the story” is as blinkered as it is clumsy. Oz and James Drink Britain reached around 3 million possibly Non-Discerning Drinkers for its first and second episodes, only two million less than the inauguration of than the 44th president of the old colonies did. Surely that does the drink and the organisation some good? Especially since as Rog's opening paragraph admits most people have heard of CAMRA, then surely the problem isn't awareness but presentation? Wouldn't it be better to look like professional inclusive organisation that can take a ribbing, not a petulant prissy and fragile interest group?

Could we not think in widescreen for a moment, and not 4:3?

Yes the programme is two buffoons buffering and bickering around Blightly in a big car, it’s not the Ascent Of Man with Doctor Jacob Bronowski, and the music is considerably more jaunty. But people watch it. Millions of people watch it – although a good number of those will be beer bloggers. But never mind the quality, feel the coverage – for real ale and ultimately for CAMRA and all of us.

Clutching At Straw

Welcome to a whole new year, the same as the old year. Welcome to another 364 days when the humble pint of beer can be demonised as the greatest threat to our civilisation since Adolf left the army, little Osama decided against joining dad’s construction business and women/blacks/the poor were allowed the vote.

So two days of 2009 have gone and already J.D. Wetherspoon’s decision to cut beer prices is being hailed as a Licence To Binge by those indignation-hawkers at The Daily Mail. Now I’m not getting involved in the politics behind beer. That isn’t why I periodically mash my face into this keyboard and let the spellchecker pick the bones out. Others can fire-hose opprobrium around, but I just like beer. Anyway I’m sure that you have your own opinions and they are no doubt less fabricated from ill-conceived mouthguff than mine.

But we need to look to the future for beer. We must - primarily so we can get there before a junior minister sees fit to flop his swollen credentials onto the dispatch box in an attempt to sate an imagined demographic that only really consists of Melanie Phillips and her bubonic afterbirth.

But I have a nifty plan. If we create our own headline-grabbing programme of anti-booze measures we can discredit any future governments plans. After all anything and anyone that appears on this blog is instantly discredited.

So we must create a raft of measures and thus render them all laughable. They must also be radical, they must be draconian too because any Speakers’ Corner driveller can call for curfews or increasing the minimum drinking age to 21.

In fact, someone somewhere on a forum is probably right now advocating the return of National Service for anyone who has ever consumed more than a small gin in a 24-hour period. It might be fun though. After all watching the CAMRA membership run over an assault course would at least be a cheap laugh and somehow more dignfied than some TV programmes.

Go Guantanmo On Their Arses
The Government have already nabbed these high-visibility orange jumpsuits for their Community Payback idiocy but that shouldn’t stop us. Originality is no bar is it Jack?

To further distance the deviants who like the odd glass of ginger wine from the rest of decent, honest, puritan, white society, anyone planning a night out or even a swift pint on the walk home should be forced to wear one of these orange jumpsuit. Not only will it have safety benefits as drivers will know to expect their toddleresque lurching on the way home but now all you need to do is pop granddad into his day-glow romper outfit before he has a Harvey’s Bristol Cream and the rest of humanity will know not to listen to his deranged and racist ‘reckonings’ anymore.

Pedestrian Breathalyser
Roads are a dangerous place to be boozed-up, sure, but what about pavements? Have you ever had to walk too near a crumpled prole or a gutter-hobbit because of their unreasoned foot-stumbling? All we need to do is equip every copper - and borderline authority figure such as teachers/masons/T.A. members- with cuffs, a breathalyser and some weapons-grade sarcasm. Combined with some comprehensive SUS laws, we could even dress it up as part of the fight against knife crime, and the GWAT. Or just introduce it into infant schools from Monday.

Warnings On Booze
Printed cigarette warnings have clearly proven a vast success; there isn’t any evidence to prove this – except that it is a fact. So logically beer warnings must use the same technique of stark slogans and big print. No, in fact the font must be bigger, bolder and the words somehow less nuanced - because remember these people might be drunk. Surely the simple sloganeering of: “No!”, “Bad” and the Alice in Wonderland-themed “Don’t Drink Me” would suffice?

To truly save the youth from the demonic drink perhaps we must take this whole principle further and attempt to shatter the traditional link between alcohol and fun. So from now on all booze should be advertised under the slogan "Party with Shami Chakrabarti”. All we need to do is let Liberty's misery in mascara glower her way through any advert for alcohol and even the delightful Old Purple Tin won’t taste so sweet.

Failing that one in every twenty bottles of Budweiser contains a surprise. Instead of ricey-goodness, each special bottle would fire steel bolts from high-pressure rams up into the roof of the mouth piercing the brain and performing an instant Budotomoy.

Alcoholic-proof bottle caps
Clearly a major problem with these unruly booze-hounds isn't just the quantity of hooch consumed, it is the timing. So by simply adding alcoholic-proof bottle caps to the top of any bottle of spirits, the hours that the grog can be consumed can be cut. Much like the childproof caps on pills, these simple devices would click annoyingly until the next Centrally Mandated Drinking Hour sounds when they would be able to unleash their intoxicating contents.

Start Your Two Minutes Of Hate
Can you do better? Of course you can, you aren’t Jacqui Smith. But why not pretend to take a hammer to the Statue Of Lady Justice yourself with your own short-term idiocy designed to appeal to Simon Heffer and his hellspawn. Type them here. Go on, it’s that or talk to your co-workers.

Real Ale, Real People

It is phenomenally easy to mock real ale drinkers. It must be because every halfpenny word-whore who has ever put ham-fist to keyboard has tried it. As deadline looms and they thrash in their paddling pool of inspiration, an accusatory Bic is jabbed in our direction and some apparently withering remarks about brown clothing or a ‘strange goatish smell’ are scratched out. Three minutes later their word limit is reached, the blank space is filled and another part of their soul leaks out. But who cares if each point is relevant as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, as grounded in reality as their last expenses claim or as densely packed with stereotypes as a rolled up copy of the Daily Mail?

Because as every as columnist, copper and paramedic knows ale drinkers aren’t really the ones that deserve these wrist-tossed of volleys of limp-invective. They are harmless individuals; peaceable, passive and shy to the point of autism. They are the blue whales of the public house. They offend no one because their only desire is a nice pint and a little peace and quiet. They don’t throw punches, they don’t throw bottles, and they don’t get themselves thrown out.

Instead the greatest danger to soul of humanity is clearly the thing that goes bump, crash and bleuurgh in the night. The bullish, the boorish and the oafish - The Non-Discerning Drinker. From Blue WKD to piss-yellow lager to green Toilet Duck, the NDD doesn’t care what they pour down their throat, or if they slash someone else’s. More commonly known as ‘the assailant’, they cause perturbation, despair and moralising politicians to increase the tax on beer.

However, since ASBOs aren’t enforced at the dangerous end of a Dalek’s plunger, these abrasive little pissdrips are still allowed to chaff against normal, decent society. So to help you avoid meeting them, we’ve created a handy Crt-C, Ctr-V guide on how to dodge their kind.

Habitat
Non-Discerning Drinkers consider a good pub to be one from which they aren’t barred, yet. Where atmosphere and alcohol selection matter to the rest of us, the mono-browed, asbestos-livered element doesn’t care what they drink, where they drink or know how much they drink.

Now this could make them very difficult to avoid - except for an unexpected benefit of the smoking ban. Now the puffing line-up outside a pub forms the perfect guide to what goes on inside. So if a row of buttoned-down Ben Sherman shirts has congregated outside, you can happily walk by. Similarly if the overheard flapping of meatholes never ascends beyond which one of Nuts’ Photoshop-smoothed cover-stars they would consider ‘doing’, there is no need to even break your stride.

Susceptibility
As mouth-breathing drones, Non-Discerning Drinkers are the foot soldiers of global capitalism. ‘Brand-loyal’ and easily influenced, they are shock troops of those major corporations who currently produce drinks but who would surely diversify into kitten-buggery - if only the EU subsidies were increased. It even says so on their mission statements too, in very fine print.

In fact NDD’s minds are so easily swayed by flashing lights and loud noises that if placed next to a merry-go-round for long enough they could be convinced to remove their own spleen with an ice-cream scoop. They would also consume it raw, so long a badly stuffed cockney bear in a pork pie hat asked them to do it. Or if they were told that Australians wouldn’t do anything else.

Conversation
Do not mistake those eyes that glisten and flash inside the fleshy, porcine skulls for signs of intelligence. It is actually pure rage. Taunted by the complexities of the modern world - locks, computers and flush toilets - they live in a state of permanent anti-intellectual rage. Any attempt to engage them on conversation beyond the basics of football, Top Gear and ‘that time that they did football with cars on Top Gear’ is akin to sketching out a your own suicide note.

Their language is limited to one simple sound: ‘Dave’. However the length and volume of this sound can communicate many different emotions and situations. From the exuberant greeting of “Dave!” to the plaintive wail of “Daaaaaaaave!” as one of their number is stumbling home with his face clanged open by a bouncer.

Clothing
At any given point during the day or night, there is a 15% chance that the average NDD will be dressed as Spider-man. Anthropologists are yet to discover quite the reason for this behaviour but seems to be connected to the NDD’s ‘pack mentality’. For often once one of these offalheads has donned this costume there is a good chance that a portly Batman in deeleyboppers will follow soon after. Note: while this behaviour is unacceptable on the public highway, when described by ‘Blowers’ during Test Match Special, it somehow becomes quite charming.

Shoes
It’s not so much the actual footwear of a NDD itself that marks this group out (Although there is a good chance that they will bear some similarity to a football boot even though the wearer has all the poise of a bin bag full of gruel.). It is more the splattering of piss, blood and bloody-piss across the toe area that will be a giveaway. This veneer is often made all the more noticeable by the wearer’s tendency to repeatedly attempt to insert them into other citizen’s faces.

Britain, considerer yourself warned.