SIBA Great Northern Beer Festival

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The SIBA Great Northern Beer Festival, organised by the Society of Independent Brewers in association with CAMRA, is taking place this weekend at the Ramada Piccadilly, in Manchester, but I sneaked off on Thursday to take part there as a judge in the Northern regional beer competition. These events are a serious business. Storing and piping 260 different cask ales to the hand pumps is difficult enough, but this year the “cellar” was above the festival hall, so the “python” of pipes carrying the beer emerged from the wall over the heads of the bar staff. Organising the judges, and making sure they get the right beers at the right time, and in good condition, is a huge undertaking. I’d be lying if I said that the judging itself was anything less than a great pleasure, but it’s a serious business too, supporting independent brewers making glorious beers.

Below are a some photos from the day, including Hawkshead brewer Matt Clarke receiving his “Champion of the Competition” award for his splendid Windermere Pale Ale.

Snowdon Summit

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Snowdon is the highest mountain in Wales, at 1085 metres, and probably the busiest mountain in the British Isles. For a century or more now there has been a refreshment hut at the summit, recently upgraded to something akin to a motorway service station, only busier, and full of exhausted, soaking wet people covered in mud. There is a gift shop, but unless you are taking the train, you will need to think about the weight of whatever memorabilia you take home. These two boys had obviously done it the hard way.

Michael Hart, 1947-2011, inventor of the ebook

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Last year I wrote a piece for the Reader magazine about ebooks, which explained to the relatively conservative and technophobic readership what they are, and how to go about reading them. The world of ebooks is changing fast, but they have been around much longer than most people realise–since 1971, in fact. That was the year that Michael S. Hart, who died on September 6th, aged 64, published the first ebook (the Declaration of Independence) to his Project Gutenberg. There are now 36,000 ebooks on the site, all of them free to download, and available in various formats. Hart was not well known, but his legacy is a revolution in the way we edit, publish, and distribute books. He saw the potential for electronic reading, and the widespread dissemination of literature and knowledge, at a time when computers lived in large, air-conditioned, and sealed facilities, and when handheld computing devices existed only in science fiction. An early obituary is here. Hart’s Wikipedia page is here.

How Shakespearean Are You?

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In my ongoing quest to find better, more efficient, more distracting procrastination tools, I came across this, from Oxford Dictionaries. You drop some text into a box, and it tells you how Shakespearean you are. The essay I’m currently working on is “84% Shakespearean” which means, apparently, that the waters of Avon are almost lapping at my feet:

How Shakespearian Are You?

Stout and Porter

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At a family gathering at the weekend I was asked what the difference is between Porter and Stout. This is a common question, and one I’ve always answered by suggesting Porter is usually, but not always, lighter coloured, less alcoholic, and sweeter than ales labelled ‘Stout’. Having drunk Stouts that might have been Porters, and Porters that might have been Stouts, I’ve never been entirely convinced that they were actually all that different, or confident that my attempt to differentiate them really worked. A little digging turned up this 2009 piece on Martin Cornell’s excellent Zythophile blog, in which he traces the parallel histories of Porters and Stouts, showing exactly that uncertainty. Interestingly, he begins his piece by saying that this question is one of the top ten search terms leading visitors to his site:

I’m not sure that there was ever a point, even when porter was at its most debased, when you could point to any truly distinctive difference between porter and stout except to say that “stout” meant a stronger version of porter. Indeed, for much of the past 300 years, to ask “what’s the difference between porter and stout?” would have been like asking “what’s the difference between dogs and Rottweilers?”

The extract above, from the ledger of the brewer at Liverpool’s Cains brewery, on Stanhope Street in 1867, confirms that Porter was, and is, a kind of Stout. Here the brewer begins by saying that on March 2nd 1867 he brewed a “XXXX Porter” using a combination of pale, brown, and black malts, but his closing statement gives it away: this was “a good fermentation and excellent Stout”. Perhaps a brewer might like to comment on the hops used in this brew: 130lb of Hereford (1865) and 130lb of Kent (1856). That’s not a misprint: brews in this ledger often include hops a decade old, or older.

So the answer to the question seems to be that Porter is a kind of Stout, but that what makes a Porter Porter (and not Stout), is open to interpretation. Is that clear now?