End of the English hop?

The English hop is apparently under threat with one hop merchant warning "If we don't stick up for the UK hop industry now, there will be no industry in a decade's time." According to the hop growers, imported foreign hops from the Czech Republic and United States are driving the English hop to the point of extinction.

In the early 1970's, Christopher Hutt in The Death of the English Pub predicted that Britain's entry into Europe would lead to a ban on the English male hop and an end to the brewing of bitter. That hasn't happened and I doubt that the Kent hopfields are going to disppear now either. Brewers have been importing Czech and US hops and using them along with English ones since at least the nineteenth century. As the the head brewer at Kent's biggest brewery Shepherd Neame says "We are hugely committed to Kentish hops for a variety of reasons. With such an abundance of great hops on our doorstep it doesn't really make sense for us to buy hops from elsewhere."

Beer and votes

After the news that President Obama is home brewing at the White House, the US magazine National Journal has published a poll which suggests that the beer Americans drink is an indicator of how they'll vote in next month's presidential election.

The poll looks at beer drinkers' position on the left-right spectrum and also how likely they are to turn out to vote. Some of the results are quite surprising. Sam Adams, brewed in the Democratic stronghold of Boston, turns out to be the favourite beer of right-of-centre Republicans most likely to turn out to vote rather than the trendy liberals you might expect to be drinking "craft beer".

Turnout is also normally a reflection of class with better-off Americans more likely to vote than poor ones. On that basis, Sierra Nevada beer from California is drunk by well-off liberals, Miller and Michelob by slightly less well-off Democrats, Heineken and Corona by left-wing blue collar workers and Busch Light by right-wing ones, neither of whom are likely to vote in November. Swing voters are split between Budweiser, Fosters and Guinness.

Next week, how the wine and spirits vote breaks down...

Alfred Russel Wallace online

The works of the nineteenth century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace have just gone online.

Wallace is best known for his collecting trip to the Malay Archipelago that led to him producing a theory of evolution by natural selection around the same time, 1858, that Charles Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species. Wallace described how it came about in his autobiography:

"The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals? It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more quickly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous in order to keep down the numbers of each species, since evidently they do not increase regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have been crowded with those that breed most quickly. Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, on the whole the best fitted live ... and considering the amount of individual variation that my experience as a collector had shown me to exist, then it followed that all the changes necessary for the adaptation of the species to the changing conditions would be brought about ... In this way every part of an animals organization could be modified exactly as required, and in the very process of this modification the unmodified would die out, and thus the definite characters and the clear isolation of each new species would be explained."

Politically Wallace was an eclectic reformer who described himself as a socialist, a Spiritualist who argued for women's suffrage and the nationalisation of the land as well as speaking out against militarism, eugenics and currency being based on gold or silver. I like the line in his 1890 article Human Selection  where he writes, "Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent."

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.

Happy birthday George

Today is the eighty-seventh birthday of the jazz promoter George Wein.

Wein, who set up the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954 and the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, is largely responsible for some of the most seminal musical performances of the sixties, including Muddy Waters performing to a white audience in the U.S. for the first time in 1960 and Dylan going electric in 1965. The 1958 Jazz Festival was filmed as Jazz on a Summer's Day with Dave Brubeck, Ray Charles and Miles Davis.

On top of all that, Wein can also cut it as a pianist.

Marx, money and straw men

I watched the final episode of the BBC2 series Masters of Money last night in which the economics correspondent Stephanie Flanders looked at whether Karl Marx has anything to say about the current financial crisis.

Flanders claimed to have "waded through hundreds of pages of Marx" - just as literary experts "wade through" Dickens and Shakespeare I suppose - but there wasn't much evidence that she had. I could have predicted most of the stock images and ideas she came up with: the fall of the Berlin Wall signalled the end of socialism, miners hacking coal for a pittance are workers, but not people who work in offices and have shiny new mobile phones, so the working-class which Marx described has disappeared, at least in Western Europe and North America, and unemployment is the inevitable result of new technology.

The main problem with the programme though was that Flanders, despite her degrees from Oxford and Harvard, clearly doesn't understand Marxist economics. She claimed that Marx thought the only way profits could increase is by workers' wages being driven down to the bare minimum needed to survive, a view that Marx actually spends a lot of those pages she claims to have "waded through" attacking. This argument was repeated by Madsen Pirie of the right-wing Adam Smith Institute who said that rising wages alongside rising profits showed that Marx had been wrong. In fact, Marx argued that technological innovation meant that workers could spend a lot less of the working week replacing the cost of their wages and that rising wages and shorter hours could go hand in hand with higher profits. She also seemed to be arguing that Marx would have been surprised at the role of credit in the current crisis, something he again spends quite a few of those "hundreds of pages" explaining.

The programme had the usual line-up of talking heads, from right-wingers like Pirie and Nigel Lawson to ex-Marxists Martin Jacques and Peter Hitchens. Tariq Ali and Slavoj Žižek came out with some pretty obvious remarks and the only person who could have given some real insights into Marx's ideas, the geographer David Harvey, got about five seconds on screen.

The programme concluded with Flanders and some of her economics professor and City trader pals agreeing that Marx has some interesting things to say about capitalism which could help the system "reinvent itself". Hopefully some of the people who watched the programme will be interested enough in his ideas to do what Flanders clearly hasn't and read Marx themselves.

Close the Coalhouse door

I listened to the Radio 4 play Close the Coalhouse Door by Alan Plater on Saturday afternoon.

Based on the writings of ex-miner Sid Chaplin, Close the Coalhouse Door is about the Durham miners' union from the strikes to achieve recognition in the 1830's through the Depression and post-war nationalisation.  It's also well known for the songs in it by Alex Glasgow which as well as Close the Coalhouse Door include As Soon As This Pub Closes and Socialist ABC.

Alan Plater wrote the play in 1968, before the coalfield battles of 1972, 1974 and 1984-5, so director Sam West brings the play up to the present day with an "alternate history" in which Thatcherism never happened. If only...