The Manchester Paper Mill(er)

The online Manchester newsletter The Mill has just published a piece on the decline of print journalism in the city, with the drop in revenues from newspaper sales and advertising leading to cuts in the number of journalists, and therefore far less interviewing people in person and investigative reporting and more "churnalism", essentially rewriting press releases without checking the facts in them yourself, and sensationalist "clickbait" stories being posted on social media to generate hits on the Manchester Evening News website (although the writers there still occasionally pen some excellent articles, such as yesterday's feature about the "forgotten district" of inner-city south Manchester, Chorlton-on-Medlock).

An epitome of pre-internet Manchester print journalism passed last week, the sports journalist and court reporter Stan Miller, whose wife was a friend  of my mother's when they worked together as draughtswomen at Metrovicks Wythenshawe Works in the sixties (he also gave the large teddy bear I had as a child the name which my younger relatives still call him by).

RIP Hugh McIlvanney

The sports journalist Hugh McIlvanney, who has died aged 84, was one of the country's most distinguished football writers in a career which spanned more than five decades, and several Fleet Street newspapers, until his retirement only a few years ago.

I think I first became aware of McIlvanney when I watched the TV programme he wrote and presented about the trinity of legendary Scottish football managers of the fifties and sixties, Matt Busby at Manchester United, Bill Shankly at Liverpool and Jock Stein who led Celtic to European Cup glory in Lisbon in 1967, as Busby did with United the following year at Wembley.

McIlvanney came from the same working-class background, the mining villages of Ayrshire and Lanarkshire in the West of Scotland, a world of hard and dangerous manual labour from a young age and a culture of self-reliance and self-education that has now all but disappeared.

I can imagine McIlvanney chatting to Busby,  Shankly or Stein with a glass of Scotch whisky in hand at the bar of a lounge above the stand at Old Trafford, Anfield or Celtic Park after a big European night under the newly-installed floodlights in the sixties, analysing in their soft Scottish brogues the team's performance in the match just played, reminiscing about the junior football they would all have known in their youth, and maybe marvelling at how far they had travelled in their different paths from that time and place.

Beer In So Many Words

Back in 2012, I wrote a blog post asking why no one had put together an anthology of beer writing. Now, a mere four years later, the publishing world has heeded my request and produced just such a book, a copy of which someone bought me for Christmas.

Beer In So Many Words has excerpts from many of the writers you'd expect to see, Charles Dickens, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, A.E. Housman and Graham Swift, although suprisingly nothing from the great chronicler of the interwar London pub Patrick Hamilton, along with a few you might not, such as Ernest Hemingway discussing Ballantine IPA, Thomas Mann's description of porter from The Magic Mountain and Robert Graves with a poem about strong ale. I especially liked the phrase penned by Dylan Thomas in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, which I hadn't come across before, about "the taste of beer , its live, white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the wet-brown walls of the glass".

One my favourite pieces though is a 1974 Sunday Times article by Ian Nairn about the state of English beer and pubs, in which he also references fellow campaigners Frank Baillie, Richard Boston and Christopher Hutt, whose first words signal how close we came to losing cask beer: "It my be the fifty-ninth second of the fifty-ninth minute after eleven o'clock, but I think there is now a chance of saving what remains of draught beer in Britain."

Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell

Yesterday, Radio 4 broadcast a dramatisation of Keith Waterhouse's play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell.

Bernard, played by John Hurt, is a journalist who, with his pals including the painter Francis Bacon and actors John Le Mesurier and Denis Shaw, inhabits the pub and clubland of the bohemian Soho area of London's West End. The play is set around the time of its first production in 1989 and takes place in the gents of the Coach and Horses pub where Bernard, having passed out after a drinking session, has been accidentally locked in for the night.

Much of the humour stems from Bernard's anecdotes about the drunken escapades of himself and his friends. I wonder if it would be produced on the West End stage today in these more censorious times or whether the anti-drink lobby would succeed in having it banned.

Bayern Munich beer bust-up

I've only just seen this story about an incident at Bayern Munich's last home game in which French Muslim winger Franck Ribery was doused in beer by a team mate celebrating the club's twenty-third League title.

The story encapsulates a lot about how the press treats Muslims and doesn't bother to check the facts before printing a story. One question strikes me though: why is Paulaner supplying Bayern with alcohol free beer?

Sticking up for Stella

There's a video doing the rounds on social media and blogs of a Swedish journalist who travels to Leuven in Belgium to interview the drinkers and brewers of Stella Artois.

It's easy to poke fun at the AB InBev PR guy who talks about his "passion" for the company's "brands" but can't describe what the beer tastes like. I'm not sure what the point is though. Stella is a long way from being the world's most exciting beer but it isn't positively unpleasant. It's better I'd say than many mass-produced lagers.

I like beer. I'd rather drink cask conditioned beer in top condition but I still prefer beer to wine or cider. Given the choice between a can of Stella and a world famous claret, I'd choose the former.

Tabloids, lies and benefits

An article in today's Daily Express is typical of how the tabloid press lies about the benefits system.

Under the headline "Benefits mum rakes in £70,000 in welfare", the Express tells its shocked readers about a divorced mother of three in Hertfordshire whose "taxpayer-funded handouts will total £3,905-a-month or a staggering £46,860-a-year...To enjoy the life she currently leads only a job paying £70,000-a-year before tax would be worth taking." So that's over £23,000 a year they've just knocked off the claim they made in the headline.

What they mean by "taxpayer-funded handouts" includes a bursary that her student son receives, £1,400 Housing Benefit that her landlord gets and exemptions from paying NHS dental charges and Council Tax. What she actually receives is Employment and Support Allowance of £394 a month (the article doesn't tell us what medical condition means she's unable to work) and tax credits of £403 a month, presumably for the children.  But I guess "Divorced mother of three struggling to bring up three kids on less than £800 a month, or £9,500 a year" wouldn't raise enough hackles over the cornflakes.

Women, wine and beer

Guess what? Some women prefer beer to wine. And some men prefer wine to beer!

I've got the Daily Telegraph to thank for this revelation. Over at The Guardian, we learn - in a piece clearly written straight from the ad agency's press release - that "fruit-flavoured ciders" (surely all ciders are fruit-flavoured?) are the next big thing in the drinks market, mainly because they "have  what is known in the drinks business as a real 'shareability' factor – that is that they are as popular with men as they are with women."

It seems to me that whether drinks appeal to men and women has far less to do with differences in male and female tastebuds than with social attitudes about a pint pot being "manly" and smaller glasses more "ladylike".

Biking Belgians

When it's not whipping up middle-class prejudices about immigration or benefits, the Daily Mail can sometimes be (unintentionally) funny.

The Mail reports in shocked tones that a few years back British cycling hero Bradley Wiggins started "collecting all 365 varieties of Belgian beer" and "regularly set off for Brussels and returned home with a van-load of local brews. He would sit at home, admiring his collection, and then start drinking it. Before long he would be standing outside the pub, waiting for the doors to open, and by the end of the day he would often have consumed a dozen pints."

I'm not sure why the Mail describes Wiggins' collection as a "unlikely obsession with Belgian beer" - beer, and cycling, are pretty much the only things Belgium is famous for. And I don't believe the claim about "365 varieties of Belgian beer". Not only does it sound on the low side, it's a bit too much of a coincidence that there's one for each day of the year.

Beer myopia

If you type "top ten" or "world's most popular" into a search engine on any topic, the first results you usually get are from WikiAnswers and Yahoo! Answers. Some of them are quite amusing. Most seem to be written by teenagers in between doing their homework online and are invariably US-centric, such as a list of the world's most popular spectator sports that includes volleyball and hockey but omits cricket.

USA Today is not a open forum website nor I presume is it written by teenagers after they get home from school. It's a mass circulation newspaper that sells a couple of million copies in the US and internationally every day. They've just published a list of the 10 best beer cities in the world.

Five of the ten are in North America and the other five are all places that American tourists are likely to go. So Denver's on the list but not Bamberg, Düsseldorf or Cologne. I'm not even sure they deserve any credit for recommending the Augustinerkeller beer garden rather than the Hofbräuhaus in Munich as the latter tourist trap is very useful in keeping the coach party hordes away from one of the most idyllic places to drink beer imaginable.

Fruit beer and journo hype

I've just read an article about a supposed "surge" in the drinking of fruit beer in Britain.

The opening sentence claims that "The traditional pint is being given a run for its money by continental-style fruit and spirit-flavoured beers, enjoyed by consumers as a thirst-quenching summer drink or to inspire imaginative pairing with food."

By "the traditional pint", I assume she means cask beer. Is it really "being given a run for its money" or is this just another example of journalistic hype? Perhaps tellingly, there are no figures given for the actual volumes of fruit beer being drunk but it's surely nowhere near the approximately two and a half million barrels (more than seven hundred million pints) of cask beer consumed annually. In fact, apart from the bottled Belgian fruit beers in their attractive paper wrapping you see in supermarkets and a couple of specialist beer bars that have them on draught, you could go to a lot of pubs and never see one.

Like "craft keg", fruit beer is a niche product that appeals mostly to beer bloggers, journalists and writers rather than the everyday drinker. I suspect that the journalist who wrote this piece is basing her claims on what her friends are drinking in some trendy North London pub or on a corporate press release.