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• 

  So Doctor Who Regenerates Just As Stonch's Blog Ends?

  Posted: January 3rd, 2010, 10:56pm CET by Alan McLeod

  

  Co-incidence? Just a fluke that the same holiday weekend sees Jeff close down Stonch's beer blog and the tenth Doctor making his exit? I was going to photoshop a Dalek in replacing the keg above but that would be a little too much effort on my part.

  Jeff, first as "Stonch" and then as himself, was a big part of 2007's British beer blogging explosion and the one who did not at that time have a foot in the trade one way or another. For a long time, before he got into the pub trade and my house filled with more kiddies, we were sending chat messages about beer blogging back and forth every other day. I looked back to see of there was a particular back and forth worth summarizing what that was about and came up with this:

  Stonch's: ... i might go and meet some folks at the pub now actualy
  me: I hide from everyone...

  The rest of the conversations are largely idle bitching sessions and working out strategies for maximization of ad revenue. Let the masters students figure that one out when they write their term papers on the early days of beer blogging. Jeff stuck his oar in with a heft in his early days but also rightly found the navel gazing boring. And, lest it be lost to mankind, in addition to taking a cask of homebrew on a train we all have to remember that Jeff was the one who gave us a time lapse movie of primary fermentation set to the music of Dolly Parton:

  I haven't met Jeff yet and may never get across the Atlantic to visit his pub but I've liked following his life and writing so much I did a screen save of his last post for posterity. Hopefully someone has archived the rest.

• 

  Canadians Need A New Word For "Not Beer" Beer

  Posted: January 3rd, 2010, 4:36pm CET by Alan McLeod

  It was with sadness but not surprise that I read yesterday's interview of Richard Musson, the vice-president of marketing for Labatt Breweries of Canada in the Globe and Mail. Even with his focus on marketing, the answers come across like he is talking about about an unknown product from a continent you have never visited. Even his concluding summary gives one the yips:

  Q: Was there anything you wanted to talk about that we didn't touch on?
  
  A: No, we talked about Bud Light Lime. It's funny, when I came here two years ago, no one talked about Bud. They said, "Oh, it sells itself." I said, If you think that, in a few years' time, it'll stop selling itself. So I made a rule that, every presentation, we start with Budweiser. Otherwise you talk about the glamorous stuff, like Stella Artois - and in the end, what pays the bills is Budweiser.

  For this to be the situation in Canada, the fact that Bud pays Labatt's bills is just weird. The flagship brand that kept Labatt afloat for decades, Blue, has been relegated to an upstate NY discount brand where a case can be bought for less than half the price it is offered a few miles to the north. And where is the Canadian nationalism? All the beer-like things mentioned by the brander are foreign - Mexican lime beer-like thing, Belgian pale ale beer-like thing and US eagle branded beer-like thing. An interview only ten years ago and certainly 20 years ago like this would have led to an immediate firing after outraged public outcry and even mockery of the very idea that Canadian beer is not the best in the world... even if it wasn't. It's like Canadian Tire no longer selling canoes, telling the market place that bass boats are all that people really want. Why doesn't the interviewer even raise the question?

  And then there is that final point: how far do these trends have to go before we get to stop using the word "beer" to describe these fluids? How different is Bud Light Lime from Zima anyway?