But if you are a CAMRA member… I’ll rephrase that: if you’re not a CAMRA member, one of the reasons you should definitely join immediately is that it gives you the chance to influence CAMRA policy. You can even vote on the organisation’s Campaign Focus for the coming year. How cool is that? Go on, get over there and join. I’m not linking to the CAMRA Website here, if you can use Google you can find it in five seconds flat. Let me put that another way: if you can’t use Google… hang on, I’m getting sidetracked.

Anyway, as I was saying. If you’re a CAMRA member, you will have received an email from the organisation’s Volunteers Director, with a link to a survey giving members input into the decision on CAMRA’s campaign focus for 2012/13. The top four campaigns (out of six) will be debated at National Executive level, and recommendations made on that basis will go from the Exec to Conference in April. So members’ answers to the survey really matter, particularly when it comes to campaigns that aren’t popular with the membership.

I won’t link to the survey here; if you can read email you can find it quickly enough. I’ll rephrase that: if you can’t read email (you’ve done this one – Ed.). I’ll tell you what’s in it, though. Here’s the draft list of six campaign priorities:

1 To encourage more people to try a range of real ales
2 To increase availability and awareness of guest beers in pubs
3 Stop tax killing beer and pubs
4 To secure an effective Government support package for pubs
5 Improve Planing Protection for pubs
6 Raise the profile of pub going and increase the number of people using pubs regularly

There’s a joke there somewhere about planing protection, but I’ve probably inflicted enough of my ‘sense of humour’ on you for one night.

And here’s how I ordered them:

6 Raise the profile of pub going and increase the number of people using pubs regularly
3 Stop tax killing beer and pubs
1 Encourage more people to try a range of real ales
5 Improve planning protection for pubs
2 Increase availability and awareness of guest beers in pubs
4 Secure an effective government support package for pubs

If it were down to me, in other words, increased availability of guest beers would drop off the bottom of CAMRA’s agenda, at least for next year; as would government support for pubs (whatever that means – and I’m enough of a libertarian to be very suspicious of the strings that would almost certainly be attached). I think my lack of enthusiasm for the ‘guest beer’ proposal is down to two things. One is simply my age: I didn’t grow up with guest beers, and I’m quite nostalgic for the world of the Beer Orders; in parts of the country I think the system worked. (In Manchester, the only alternative to drinking Hyde’s bitter was finding a Holt’s, Robinson’s, Lee’s, Boddies’, Wilson’s, Greenall Whitney, Burtonwood or Marston’s house. How we suffered.) More importantly, I’m not sure exactly what they’re asking for or who they’re asking. 6 and 1 are things CAMRA members can do, individually and collectively; 3 and 5 are things CAMRA can demand from the government. Who is going to increase availability of guest beers in pubs, and how? A massive expansion of JDW’s would do the trick, but I’m not convinced that what’s good for Tim Martin is necessarily good for Britain (or CAMRA).

There’s also a small free-text box where you can put in any campaign they’ve missed. I thought about the smoking ban – I love smoke-free pubs, but a blanket ban was the wrong way to go; the effect on the trade is unarguable. But eventually I went for

Against neo-prohibitionism, for beer drinking as part of a healthy lifestyle

with this in the “any other comment” box:

CAMRA is in favour of alcohol consumption and shouldn’t be ashamed of it. The average moderate drinker has better long-term health prospects than the average teetotaller; CAMRA should be shouting about this, and having nothing to do with crypto-prohibitionists like Alcohol Concern.

Also, it would be nice to have some recognition that beer bloggers are, in the main, ordinary beer drinkers rather than invaders from the planet Craft Geek.

“Planet Craft Geek” doesn’t quite work; what I meant was “from the planet BeerAdvocate”, but anyone who didn’t understand beer bloggers certainly wouldn’t understand that reference.

Those are my priorities, anyway; yours may be different, and if you’re a CAMRA member you can fill in the survey yourself. Put it another way (don’t even think of it – Ed.).

There are a lot of naysayers who object purely on principle to paying £10 for a bottle (or a pint) of beer. I’m not exactly sure why that is – it would be easy to say that it’s jealousy, but I think there’s something more fundamental going on. I think it’s the idea that there is something posh, snobby, pretentious – call it what you want – about spending your money on fancy, rare or expensive beer. Just as I’d defend anyone’s right to spend their money on anything that they want (as long as it isn’t criminal, in the legally defined sense), I’d also defend anyone’s right to express their discomfort about it. But that’s just what I think – I’d love to hear your views on that idea.

Tied into this is the idea that people who buy fancy, rare or expensive beer are doing so because they somehow think they are better than people who don’t. For this to be true, there would have to be a substantial amount of blog content denigrating the sort of beers that “only” cost below £3 a pint.

Elitism is a difficult one. If you like good beer, it’s hard to get away from saying that you prefer better beer, which is only a hop and a skip away from saying that you like the best beer. And if you like the best, and if the best happens to be within your price range, what could be wrong with that? Clearly it would be wrong if you looked down on all the people drinking inferior beer, but (Zak argues) this doesn’t actually happen – not in the British blogosphere, anyway – so what’s the problem?

Something’s got lost in this argument, and – ironically – it’s money. I’ve got no objection to the existence of people who are keen to buy beer priced at twice or three times the level I find affordable, although for obvious reasons I prefer not to socialise with them much. I don’t think they’re bad people, or that they hold offensive attitudes; I don’t really care what attitudes they hold. What I object to is seeing beers priced at twice or three times the level I think of as affordable – and being told that those beers are the latest & greatest, where it’s at, just too, too fab and groovy, etc. (NB check current slang before publishing). Down at the Marble Beerhouse, the new Decadence 750ml has gone on sale at £13£16 and the new barleywine at £16 dear God £19. £16, let alone £19, represents a new high for Marble, and although I generally wish them well I would be delighted if they couldn’t sell them at those prices. I should think they will sell, though, which saddens me. I don’t like being priced out of a market, least of all this one. It makes me feel that I’m losing something I’ve always thought of as mine – and mine to share, potentially, with just about anyone (there aren’t many people who can’t afford a pint in a pub).

There are two parts to this. For myself, firstly, I suppose it’s not quite true to say that I can’t afford those beers. I could find the money if I really wanted to, but – as I said over at B&B – that’s a bit of a red herring: I mean, I could find the money to buy a Rolex if I really wanted to. Beer is something I’m used to buying without worrying about what size hole it’s going to leave in my bank account, and I don’t find that frisson of stress and anxiety adds much to the experience. A bottle of beer at £10 isn’t unaffordable, it just comes in on the wrong side of a sharp intake of breath.

That’s the part about me; the other part of it is about everyone else. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in the 70s – when the old hippies were settling down and starting businesses – but I’ve always bracketed real ale with real bread and real cheese. I don’t want to live in a world where most people drink Carlsberg and eat processed cheese squares on white sliced, while the cognoscenti compare notes about their muslin-wrapped Stilton, their wood-oven ciabattas and their, well, you fill in the beer. People who say – to quote a commenter at Zak’s – that “brewers have the right to charge as much as they want for the product of their labour” (to whoever wants to pay that much) don’t often acknowledge the other side of the coin: just as there will always be people willing to pay top whack for ultra-premium specialist goods, there will always be people willing to buy substandard goods if it means paying a bit less. Left unregulated, food producers (and large brewers) are quite happy to fill both of those niches – have a look round the supermarket next time you’re there.

So I’m not offended by people buying bottles of beer priced at the level of a bottle of champagne; what I’m offended by is the pricing of the beer. Beer at those prices is effectively out of my reach, and it’s out of reach of all the people with an income like mine or lower – and there are plenty of them. Every time a blogger raves about one of those bottles, it nudges the image of ‘beer’ a little further towards that end of the scale. My ideal world is one where everyone is eating and drinking good wholesome stuff – where cotton-wool bread, ‘cheese food’ and whatever it is they brew in Moss Side aren’t even available. My big problem with the £10 bottle is that it doesn’t bring that world any nearer; it may even push it further back, by turning campaigners for a good honest drink into connoisseurs of the latest, weirdest, rarest… and most expensive.

A ‘red’ bitter is one of my favourite styles, and this was a good one. Not much sourness, but a big hit of tannic bitterness in the middle of your mouth, backed by a good wallop of malt. A big flavour all round.

I seem to have known what I meant by ‘red’ – something big and malty, more sweet than sour, with a bit of IPA-ish bitterness for balance.

These days I’m not so sure. I started wondering after trying Hawkshead Red in the course of a ‘Mild Magic’ pub-crawl: as I said at the time, in the absence of milds in one pub “I settled for a half of Hawkshead Red, assuming from the name that it would at least tick the ‘malty’ box. What I got was a hop bomb – a prickly, aniseedy hop bomb, rather reminiscent of Buxton’s current range.” Then there was Dark Star Carafa Jade, similarly badged up as a ‘red’ ale, and just as full-on if not more so: there is malt there, I guess, but it’s subsumed into this odd sort of exploding-liquorice effect at the front of your mouth. Most confusing of all was BrewDog Hops Kill Nazis, a 7.2% keg beer which I ordered on the naive assumption I was going to get something hoppy and pale. What I got was dark – almost black – and thick in texture; the flavour was intensely sour, to the point where I would have taken it back if it had come out of a cask. Hop bitterness took a back seat, and the kind of smoky hop perfume I anticipated wasn’t there in any strength; instead, there was this sourness, qualified by a big alcohol hit and a syrupy aniseed flavour at the front of the mouth. Checking it out afterwards I discovered that this, too, is marketed as a ‘red’ ale.

So is that what ‘red’ means these days – aniseed, liquorice, dark but prickly? Where did it come from – is this the malt revival I used to dream of, only filtered through (as it were) a mouthful of hops? Alternatively, are brewers actually aiming for the style of the old ‘red’ bitters but missing, possibly because they just can’t resist hopping them to the max? What is up with the sourness of that BrewDog thing – are they going for the ‘red’ of Flemish ‘red ales’ (e.g. Rodenbach)? And what on earth is a double imperial red beer? Questions, questions.

Update Just to confuse matters, Lancaster Red turns out to be exactly what I used to think a ‘red’ bitter was like: a big brown malty bitter, with not much going on on the hop aroma front, but with enough character to dispel any suspicion of boringness. The meaning of ‘red’ is becoming still more obscure.

PS XTC, second album, last track on side one. Very under-rated album.

The Indigo album marks the first quarter of the 52fs year: 13 songs down, 39 to go. With that in mind, here’s a quick retrospective post on the project.

Songs posted so far: 34
Traditional songs: 22
Contemporary songs: 12 (authors: Peter Bellamy, Bellamy/Kipling, Peter Blegvad, Noel Coward, Bob Dylan, Green Gartside, Richard Thompson, Lal Waterson, Joss Whedon)
Whistle tunes: 3
Songs with backing: 11 (including all the last eight)
Backing instruments: 4 woodwind, 3 free reed (including a melodica I didn’t own two months ago), drums (not played for 30 years), voices, some programming

I had no idea there was going to be all this playing involved when I started! The next frontier is harmony; the ‘white’ album (over Christmas and New Year) is going to feature a fair amount of singing in parts, something I’ve never done before. It’ll be great, probably.

So, what have I learned so far?

1. My voice sounds very different when recorded. Very very very different. Obviously I knew this already, but spending a lot of time with my recorded voice has really brought it home to me. Lots of takes, lots of close listening, and you start hearing a voice that’s very different from what you thought you were producing…
1a. …and start thinking “maybe I need to work on that”. In my head I’m always giving a peak performance – that hypnotic Musgrave I did that time, that back-wall-nailing Trees They Do Grow High… Listening back, this turns out not to be the case; a lot of the time, particularly on first takes, what I hear is just this bloke singing…
1b. …and sometimes not in a terribly distinctive voice – although sometimes I do listen to a take and think “that’s me – I’ll do more like that”. I’ve been singing all my life, and singing in public on a fairly regular basis since 2004; it seems weird to be thinking about ‘finding a voice’ now, but there it is.

2. Although I’ve always seen myself as an unaccompanied singer, it turns out that accompanied singing is a lot of fun…
2a. …especially drones (which I never thought I’d get into)…
2b. …but also harmonies, rhythm tracks, chords (I love my melodica)…
2c. …although doing them all multi-tracked is an incredible time-sink…
2d. …which imposes definite limits on how close to perfection I can afford to get…
2e. …and layering separate tracks recorded without a click is an absolute no-no, unless you really enjoy wielding the virtual razor-blade in Audacity. There’s timing that sounds absolutely regular, and then there’s timing that is absolutely regular, down to the tenth of a second – and that’s a lot harder.

3. Uploading home recordings to a Web site is not going to enable me to give up the day job. (Fortunately I like the day job.) Obviously I knew this already too, but it’s really been brought home to me…
3a. …that there aren’t millions of people who like listening to this stuff, at least not online, not all the way through (why don’t people just leave the thing playing?) and…
3b. …there definitely aren’t millions of people who like downloading it; and, more generally…
3c. …the Web is no place to build a profile, unless you’re very talented, very photogenic, very lucky or gifted with a herd of football-playing pigs; it’s a great shop-front, but I think you still need to build awareness in the real world. There is just too much music out there for a single project like this to make much of a splash. (Or maybe it’s a slow-burning splash; there have definitely been more plays per day per track of the songs on the Indigo album than the ones on its Violet predecessor. We shall see.)

4. Bandcamp’s statistics distinguish between ‘complete’ (>90%) plays, ‘skips’ (stopped before 10%) and ‘partial’ (>10% but <90%). The number of partials and skips is extraordinary, not to say slightly alarming. (On the other hand, the songs with the most partial plays generally have the most full plays as well, so I suppose it all works out.) Aggregating all three, my top five tracks are:
1 Lord Bateman
2 There are bad times just around the corner (Noel Coward)
3 Derwentwater’s farewell
4= Us poor fellows (Peter Bellamy)
4= The unfortunate lass

On full plays alone, the top five (or seven) are:
1 Lord Bateman
2 The unfortunate lass
3 There are bad times just around the corner
4 The cruel mother
5= Derwentwater’s farewell
5= Us poor fellows
5= The death of Bill Brown

Propping up the table (sorted on all plays together) are

28. Hughie the Graeme
29. St Helena lullaby (Rudyard Kipling)
30. Serenity (Joss Whedon)
31. Percy’s song (Bob Dylan)
32. The unborn Byron (Peter Blegvad)

(I’m excluding the album-only House[s] of the Rising Sun from the list; hence the last place is number 32, not 34.)

Things look slightly different if we sort on full plays, as there are six songs for which the ‘complete play’ count is stuck at zero – these songs haven’t been played all the way through at all. What are you like, world? There’s some great stuff here:

The unborn Byron
The death of Nelson
Percy’s song
Boney’s lamentation
Dayspring mishandled (Rudyard Kipling)
Danny Deever (Rudyard Kipling)

Generally the newer stuff seems to have gone down less well than the traditional songs – which are, after all, what 52fs is all about, so I can’t really complain.

5. Even if I were the only audience – which I’m not, although (as we see) for a couple of tracks it’s a close thing – 52fs is proving to be an incredibly enjoyable and absorbing project; I’m learning all the things about music I’ve always vaguely thought I ought to know, as well as some unexpected but useful things about my voice.

Here’s the link to the album again: 52 Folk Songs – Indigo. Roll up! Roll up! And here are links to a couple of personal favourites, plus a couple which may have had less attention than they deserve.

When we say craft beer, we mean a group of beers, including many real ales, which, in our view, are a good thing and deserving of respect.

(Emphasis in original.)

That’s the short version; the longer version consists of a list of criteria, mainly applying to the brewery, and headed

Craft breweries and craft beers will have some of the following characteristics.

(Emphasis not in original.)

I have to say, I think this is all a bit of a waste of effort. Unless I’m talking about the American brewing scene – where the term came from, and where it arguably makes some sense – I never use the phrase “craft beer”, for three reasons.

Firstly, it’s divisive. At least, it’s been used – in Britain – in ways that are openly and deliberately divisive, by people who make a point of displaying contempt for large parts of the beer scene, and I think it carries overtones of this kind of usage. B&B write elsewhere:

If people just starting out on beer happen to get all excited about Guinness, or crazily hoppy American IPAs, we should be encouraging them, not sneering.

I agree entirely, but when I hear the words ‘craft beer’ I hear sneering. Specifically, I hear something very like the “what’s the matter, Lagerboy” snobbery of old, only this time it’s aimed at boring brown beer, people who drink boring brown beer, people who like (supposedly boring) brown beer, people who don’t like double IPAs, people who don’t like imperial stouts, people who don’t like ‘craft keg’, Colin Valentine, the CAMRA executive and CAMRA members in general. “Lagerboy” snobbery was crazy because it was alienating the very people who CAMRA needed to win over, but this new brand of snobbery is even worse – it’s alienating the minority of people who are already into good beer.

Secondly, it’s incredibly imprecise. Read literally, B&B’s long definition implies that the only breweries that aren’t ‘craft breweries’ are those that have none of the listed characteristics; and, since one of them is “They brew cask- or bottle-conditioned beer”, this in turn implies that all real ale brewers are ‘craft brewers’ – as well as some that don’t produce real ale. (I know I’m being a pedantic pain in the backside here, but that’s what definitions are for. If you’re defining quality X, you have to be able to say when something is not-X.)

Thirdly, it’s unnecessary. I don’t insist on bottle-conditioning when I’m buying bottled beer, and I can’t really get behind the idea that bottle-conditioned beer is “real ale in a bottle” (brewery-conditioned beer would be “keg in a bottle”, presumably). I’ve been drinking Old Tom on a fairly regular basis since I first discovered it; the cask is better, of course, but the brewery-conditioned bottled version is still one of the greats. So when Bailey comments that “if you don’t think ‘real ale’ captures every beer worth being excited about, ‘craft beer’, however compromised and crap, is the current best alternative”, I can’t agree – not because I’ve got a better solution, but because I don’t believe there’s a problem.

No, ‘real ale’ doesn’t capture every beer worth being excited about; it never did. Not all great beer is real ale; not all real ale is great beer. If you want to talk about a great beer that doesn’t qualify as real ale, I can’t see what’s stopping you.

The last time round I worked my way through about half of the card and kept detailed notes, most of which (as I mentioned earlier) are now obsolete. I didn’t see that much of it this time, for a variety of reasons, and I can’t say my socks were knocked off by much that I did have. Generally the pale beers were more distinctive and more impressive than the dark – Brewster’s American Chopper, for instance, was a nice little hop-monster, and Everard’s Whakatu was worth checking out. I was pleasantly surprised by the draught Ginger Beard, as I said earlier; less so by the American ‘craft ales’ which were prominently featured. Kalamazoo Black Silk struck me as a rather laboured and unsuccessful attempt to do something different with porter, a style which can have tremendous depths of flavour if brewed without any messing about; Odell 90 Shilling was just a bit bland, and not believable for a moment as a “beyond eighty-shilling” dark beer. Bend Eclipse dark IPA (or Cascadian Dark Ale if you prefer) was good – although, again, it was a long way from being the most extreme or emphatic example of the style I’ve had, despite it being an ‘American’ style. (That would be Buxton Black Rocks. Mmm, Buxton.)

So far so lukewarm (figuratively, I hasten to add). But there was one beer I was seriously glad to encounter: Evan-Evans’ 1767. A brown, malty Welsh bitter, and a very fine example of the style* – also, a good example of the depth, richness and complexity that an ordinary brown session bitter can deliver, if done properly. On checking out Evan-Evans I discovered that its Chief Executive is none other than Simon Buckley, whose family produced the first real ale I ever had in a pub – and one of the standards by which I’ve judged beers ever since. Simon left Buckley’s in 1984, the last of the family to be involved in the business; the company was bought out by Brain’s in 1997 and the brewery closed the following year. Evan-Evans has been in business since 2003, but it hasn’t crossed my radar till now (possibly to do with the location of my radar in Saxon territory). Belatedly, welcome back to brewing, Buckley bach.

*Is it a style? Seems pretty distinctive to me – it would probably have its own encyclopedia entry in my ideal world (“historic brewers include Felinfoel, Brains, Buckley’s (until 1997); newcomers to the style include Evan-Evans, Conwy…”).

And speaking of encyclopedias… Actually I’ve got nothing to add to the great Oxford Companion controversy, except to say that Rule 1 of evaluating an encyclopedia (or any other wide-ranging work of reference) is check what you know. It’s not so much that finding errors in the parts you know about introduces the possibility that the rest of it may also contain errors; if there are errors you can identify, the question of whether the rest of it is any good doesn’t even arise, because you can’t afford to trust it. Entries on an area you don’t know may be the kind of Pattinsonian erudition you could stake money on, or they may be as mythical as the old three-threads story: you can’t know. Pace B&B, the errors identified by Martyn, Barm and others aren’t just individual errors in an otherwise trustworthy work – they make the volume as a whole impossible to trust. Which is tragic, and I hope that the reputation of the OCB will be salvaged in a future edition – although it has to be said that the initial reaction of the Companion‘s editor wasn’t particularly hopeful in that respect. Rule 1 of responding to criticism, incidentally, is to de-personalise wherever possible: if they read your book and call you an idiot, go to the bits they’ve quoted and show, politely and patiently, that they don’t support that conclusion. (If they haven’t quoted anything, point that out and let readers draw their own conclusion.) Sadly, Garrett Oliver’s response to Martyn’s criticisms – which focused entirely on the text of the OCB – took precisely the opposite tack: he inferred that only a dishonest idiot would make the kind of mistakes Martyn had pointed out and took umbrage at being called a dishonest idiot, before proceeding to attack Martyn personally. Really not useful.

When I’m not drinking, baby, you’re on my mind
When I’m not sleeping, honey, when I ain’t sleeping,
When I’m not sleeping, you know, you’ll find me crying
- Jackson C. Franks

when I’m drinking, I’m always thinking,
And wishing that Peggy Gordon was there.
- Anon.

When I’m not drinking, and sometimes when I am, I’m often singing. Like Darren – whose Blog O’Beer has recently re-emerged under the name of Folk and Ale – I’m a bit of a folkie. I’ve been singing at folk clubs for eight and a bit years, generally unaccompanied but without a finger in my ear. (Nor do I wear sandals. I have got a beard, though, and obviously I’m fairly fond of real ale.) For about the last three years I’ve been a dedicated traddie, devoted to that great ocean of songs that you never hear on the radio.

Last year Jon Boden of Bellowhead put together A Folk Song A Day: a Web site featuring a different song, newly recorded, every day for a year. There were arguments in the comments about some of the choices, but by and large AFSAD was a magnificent project. (And is. The Webmaster is currently cycling through the year for a second time, re-upping the songs month by month; if you missed it first time round, check it out.) Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and AFSAD has had quite a few emulators: there’s An Australian Folk Song A Day (which has been going for eight months), A Liverpool Folk Song A Week (six months) and A Folk Song A Week (seven weeks).

And there’s my own project, 52 Folk Songs, which is just about to enter its eighth week. The idea of 52fs is that the revitalisation of old songs shouldn’t be the exclusive preserve of star musicians like Jon Boden, who have armies of fans, state-of-the-art recording facilities, multi-instrumental musical talents, encyclopedic knowledge and a pleasing and tuneful voice. No, we singers can all play our part – even if we have very few of those attributes, or none at all.

I therefore set myself to record and upload a folk song every week for a year. Common sense and good taste might have suggested limiting myself to one song per week, but if they did I wasn’t listening: there are quite a few extras there too, not all of which are even folk songs. Tenuous links between the songs chosen can be traced, for those with unfeasibly large amounts of time on their hands, at 52fs. The total for the first six weeks is 14 songs and three tunes:

1 Lord Bateman (FS01)
2 The Death of Bill Brown (FS02)
3 The Unfortunate Lass (FS03)
4 The Cruel Mother (FS04)
5 Lemany (FS05)
6 The London Waterman (FS06) + Constant Billy
7 Over the hills and far away
8 There are bad times just around the corner (Noel Coward)
9 My boy Jack (Rudyard Kipling)
10 Us poor fellows (Peter Bellamy)
11 Down where the drunkards roll (Richard Thompson)
12 Child among the weeds (Lal Waterson)
13 Hegemony (Green Gartside)
14 Spencer the Rover + Three Rusty Swords / The Dusty Miller

Not content with inflicting these assorted squawks on the world, I’ve now had the unmitigated audacity to make them available under the guise of an ‘album’: 52 Folk Songs – Violet. This is the first in a series of eight virtual ‘albums’ (I use the quotation marks advisedly) that will be appearing over the year, unless I’m prevailed upon to stop. It can be downloaded at 52 Folk Songs – Violet for a token payment of 52p (you see what I did there). This gets you 40 minutes of what can loosely be called singing and some frankly amateurish whistle-playing, plus a hastily thrown-together PDF file containing full lyrics plus assorted pictures, comments, musings and afterthoughts. The whole lamentable package is fronted by the most un-folk-like image you could imagine (“what’s the purple doughnut for?” – my wife).

Alternatively you can download the tracks individually and pay nothing at all, or simply listen online. It might be even simpler just to listen to something else instead.

But don’t let me put you off. 52 Folk Songs is at http://www.52folksongs.com.

The purple doughnut is here.

Share and enjoy.

But what is a ginger beer? When I was a kid I made ginger beer one summer using a ginger beer ‘plant’; it’s the closest I’ve got to home brewing (and there is yeast involved, which I guess makes it a distant relation of proper brewing). The trouble with making ginger beer is that at the end of the week you find yourself with a lot of ginger beer, and the end of the next week you make as much again: you need to drink it pretty hard just to stay on top of the production process. When we went on holiday that year we left a week’s worth of ginger beer in the shed; while we were away the (residual) yeast got to work on the (plentiful) sugar, and we came home to several bottles of something not particularly sweet, very fizzy indeed and quite noticeably alcoholic. I don’t know how he made it, but Brendan Dobbin’s alcoholic ginger beer reminded me of nothing so much as that accidental experiment with fermented ginger beer; it wasn’t especially hoppy but it wasn’t sweet, either, and it was a serious thirst-quencher.

So that’s one way to interpret “ginger beer”: as an [alcoholic ginger beer]. Alternatively you could go down the alcopop route, effectively make a ginger beer and spike it: alcoholic [ginger beer]. Or you could do a Ginger Marble, make beer and flavour it with ginger: that would be ginger [beer].

Lately, a lot of ginger beers I’ve tasted have tasted more like alcoholic [ginger beer] than like ginger [beer] – and, having effectively lost my sweet tooth, the former is a style I struggle with these days. The spring version of Robinson’s Ginger Tom fell right into this category; the bottled version was a bit better – more fire, less sweetness – but still rather sticky and cloying in a way that’s not true of either Old Tom or Chocolate Tom. More recently I had the bottled Robinson’s GB; better – more beer-like – but still a bit on the sweet side.

With the Ginger Tom disappointment in mind, I studied the label of Wychwood’s Ginger Beard long and hard before I put any money down: did it mention sweetness? did it mention ginger beer as an ingredient or additive? No and no; I was reassured. The beer, sadly, was a crashing disappointment: less like Ginger Marble, more like the light Ginger Tom (which is specifically described as a mixture of Old Tom and ginger beer).

But there’s hope, in the form (oddly enough) of Wychwood’s Ginger Beard – on cask. I had a third today in the local Spoons, just to give it one more chance, and I was apprehensive that I might end up bolting it and turning to one of the others to take the taste away. To my surprise, there was no sweetness or ‘ginger beer’ flavour at all – just a fairly brown, fairly malty session bitter, very pleasantly overlaid with a ginger burn. Refreshing stuff, and definitely ginger [beer] rather than [ginger beer]; I could drink quite a lot more than a third of a pint of that.

All I need now is for someone to get hold of Brendan Dobbin’s recipe for [alcoholic ginger beer] and revive it. Any volunteers?

My father was a civil servant; he was a lay reader in our local church, but never took it any further. By contrast, the Rector of Lowestoft went on to considerably greater things: he was ordained a bishop in 1975, and served as Bishop of Peterborough from 1984 to 1996, making frequent appearances in the press and on Thought for the Day. When he retired, he even got his own beer: Oakham brewed a cask ale called Bishop’s Farewell to mark the occasion. Fifteen years on, they’ve revived it as a bottled beer. It’s available as part of Sainsbury’s Great British Beer Hunt, and it’s a bit of a beast: all I can say is that I’m glad I acquired the taste for HYBs before trying it. Decidedly bitter, and very hoppy without messing about with wifty-wafty citrussy, flowery flavours; just a big bag of assertively earthy hops, right between the eyes. What can I say – if you like hops, get one in. I made a point of going back for a second bottle – that, and the Profanity Stout. (And a couple of others where I forgot that I’d got one already. Tasting notes, that’s what this blog needs.)

Sadly, Bill Westwood died a few years after Oakham had celebrated his retirement, aged 73. My Dad died a couple of years after that, aged 87; he and my mother had long since lost touch with the Westwoods. I don’t know what became of their son Tim; I hope things worked out for him.

Firstly, Marble. What’s going on there at the moment? They seem to have gone bottle crazy. The local CAMRA mag mentioned that they’d bottled a Tripel and a Weizen (the latter brewed at 5% and bottled in a 500 ml size, which is nice to see) – but that’s not the half of it. There’s also a re-brewed Vuur & Vlam (now labelled Manchester Vuur & Vlam), and – to go with the Tripel – a Dubbel. Sadly I’m unable to tell you what most of these are like – for me, Marble’s big-bottle prices tend to come in the wrong side of a sharp intake of breath. I did succumb to the appeal of the MV&V when I first saw it, but I’m afraid the D. and the T. are going to remain a mystery for a while longer. (Unless there are any bottles going for review…?)

Secondly, Morrison’s. I mentioned this on a non-beer blog, so I might as well mention it here too – Morrison’s are currently doing rather good things with beer, including an own-brand ‘green hop’ beer brewed by Titanic and selling at £1.50. (It’s a beer in the currently popular style of Hoppy Yellow Bastard, and very drinkable indeed. On the down side, clear glass. Worth a punt, though.) They’ve also got a “four for £5.50″ offer, which is stupendously good value – particularly when the beers involved include Summer Lightning, Ringwood Fortyniner, Castle Rock Harvest Pale, Butcombe Bitter, Bateman’s XXB… the list goes on. If you’ve got one locally, get down there.

Finally, That London. Where’s a good place to drink in London, then? We’ll be staying in the King’s Cross area and spending most of the time wandering around the usual Zone 1 tourist-y areas, so don’t bother recommending anywhere in Whitechapel or Archway. Also, must be big enough to swing a cat, have adequate seating, not be rammed with men in suits & generally be (Mudge, look away now) family-friendly. Family-friendly pub, central London, good and/or interesting beer. As many as you like.