More stuff to read....

A few interesting reads from around the web. The first's an article from Craft Beer & Brewing, a US site that's mainly aimed at homebrewers. Many of its articles are too US-centric for my taste, but it does also carry some thought-provoking pieces, including this one, Do IBUs matter? Some drinkers – notably hopheads – are obsessed with IBUs, apparently believing the higher a beer's IBU rating, the better it is. This article explains why IBUs tell you something about a beer, but not everything, not by a long chalk!

Like CAMRA's technical committee, which has finally acknowledged that you can have keg-conditioned real ale, I've had more than a few of those cask vs keg discussions where you try to point out that today's kegs are a world apart from the Red Barrels of the 1970s, then someone says “Well, what about the xyz-keg?” and you have to admit that, actually you don't know that one. So it was great to read this long piece on the Ale is Good blog which is basically explaining from a distributor or server's point of view what all the different kegs are. He doesn't really cover the real ale aspects, but hey, there be dragons...

Original 1930s conetop beer cans

And then earlier today, I picked up an item on Jeff Bell's blog where he quotes a tweet from Fuller's John Keeling, expressing the latter's doubts over micro-canning – doubts which Jeff shares. It reminded me that I never really flagged up my own article on the subject of micro-canning, which was published earlier this year in Engineering & Technology, the magazine of the Institution of Engineering & Technology. I was very pleased with the way it came out in print, and the online version's pretty nice too.

This last one was sent in to me, it's an incomer's view of The Best Bars in Neukölln – a hip district of Berlin that is now gentrifying, after decades as a big Turkish & Lebanese area. I mention the article partly because it reminds me how different people have quite different motives for loving bars and pubs. Berlin is home to a bunch of great breweries, several of them in Neukölln including Berliner Berg which is one of the newest, and Privatbrauerei am Rollberg which is inside the old Berliner Kindl brewery building (and which seems to have overcome my initial misgivings to become very well liked). Yet in all his discussion of bars the only beer he mentions is Neumarkter Lammsbräu which is from Oberpfalz in Bavaria!