{"id":279385,"date":"2025-06-07T13:10:39","date_gmt":"2025-06-07T13:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/uncategorized\/news-nuggets-and-longreads-7-june-2025-into-the-night\/"},"modified":"2025-06-07T13:10:39","modified_gmt":"2025-06-07T13:10:39","slug":"news-nuggets-and-longreads-7-june-2025-into-the-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=279385","title":{"rendered":"News, nuggets and longreads 7 June 2025: Into the Night"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we\u2019ve got German porter, more steam beer, and beer ties.<\/strong><\/p>\n

First, some news. Robbie Pickering<\/strong>, AKA \u2018Rob Sterowski\u2019, has started posting on his blog I Might Have a Refreshing Beer<\/em> again after a long hiatus. As a German speaker, and a Germanophile, he\u2019s long had an eye on that country\u2019s beer scene and beer history. This week, he brought us news of ownership shenanigans in Cologne<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I was surprised and rather puzzled to read that one of the last remaining family-owned K\u00f6lsch breweries, Malzm\u00fchle, is to sell its brand and brewing business to one of the others, Gaffel\u2026 The puzzling thing about all this is that Malzm\u00fchle, just a couple of years ago, itself took over another of the remaining independent breweries, S\u00fcnner. And that is staying open \u2013 so they say at the moment, at least. So they still have a brewery where they could produce M\u00fchlen K\u00f6lsch\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As Robbie makes clear in the post, there are a dwindling number of actual breweries in Cologne, and a lot of orphan\/zombie K\u00f6lsch brands. It\u2019s just got a bit harder again for drinkers to know who made the beer they\u2019re drinking and where it was brewed.<\/p>\n

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We\u2019ll stick with Robbie whose second piece this week is a lengthy exploration of Germany and its relationship with porter<\/a> in the early 19th century:<\/p>\n

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For a while, I had been trying to research Schwarzbier, the black lager from Thuringia, and the trail led back to Haldensleben, a small town near Magdeburg. It was from here in 1875 that a young brewer called Rudolf Zersch left his parents\u2019 imposing, though run-down, half-timbered home and brewery, and travelled south to take over the royal brewery in tiny K\u00f6stritz near Gera, which is now, due in no small part to Zersch\u2019 efforts, the home of the world\u2019s best-known Schwarzbier\u2026 But then I found out that the Zersch family brewery, interesting though it was (they brewed Broihan there), was not the most exciting thing about Haldensleben\u2026 For it was here in the second decade of the nineteenth century that one of the first attempts was made to bring the British industrial revolution to Germany. And part of that operation was a much bigger brewery, brewing the beer that stood like no other for the industrial age: Porter.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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At Beervana<\/em> Jeff Alworth<\/strong> has provided a footnote to his recent article about California Common reflecting on what\u2019s happening, or not happening, with the much-anticipated resurrection of Anchor Brewing in San Francisco<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I wrote [Craft Beer & Brewing<\/em>] the article after Chobani-founder and rich guy Hamdi Ulukaya purchased Anchor, seemingly saving it from history\u2019s dustbin. But even then, the old plant had been sitting derelict in San Francisco for months. Instead of putting the brewery and its workers, many of whom were available, back to work, the building remains vacant. It\u2019s a mysterious situation: zero appears to have happened since the sale, and no one even knows who to ask about its progress (I tried!)\u2026 Then, less than a week ago, the San Francisco Standard<\/em> published a follow-up confirming that, nope, nothing seems to be happening and nope, it\u2019s impossible to find anyone close enough to Ulukaya who knows what\u2019s going on. One year since Ulukaya\u2019s purchase, Anchor is further from making beer than ever\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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In the latest edition of her newsletter Under the Jenfluence<\/em> Jen Blair<\/strong> has written about craft breweries and gentrification<\/a>. Her perspective is American but British readers will recognise many of the same drivers and problems:<\/p>\n

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Breweries became a cornerstone of community redevelopment and revitalization projects in the 2010s\u2026 no neighborhood is properly gentrified unless and until a brewery opens up in it. Gleaming stainless, chalkboard beer menus, pothos and spider plants abound, and lumbar-destroying Lancaster chairs\u2026 But are those breweries actually part of the community? \u2026 Does the ownership\/leadership get in their cars at the end of the day and drive home to the suburbs or across town? \u2026 I can continue to ask a bunch of hypothetical questions, but I think you get the point. Many breweries opened in areas targeted by cities and other local governments for revitalization. Because breweries are \u201ccool\u201d and can act as anchors to attract other small businesses that exist for a very narrow slice of the population.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The Pub Curmudgeon<\/strong> asks a fair and challenging question<\/a>: what exactly is the utopia that campaigners want to get to by abolishing the beer tie? And how will the economics of that utopia work in practice?<\/p>\n

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The idea that tied leases could be scrapped is entirely fanciful. The raison d\u2019\u00eatre of pubcos is operating pubs, so, as with the Big Six before them, they are not going to hold on to estates of free-of-tie properties. They would convert the best of them to direct management, or the franchise models that are becoming increasingly common, and sell the rest off. A few might go to sitting tenants, but most would be snapped up by true property companies who would milk them for all they were worth and have no interest in maintaining them as pubs. And independent free houses are only guaranteed survival as long as their owner wants to stay in the business. Whenever they want to retire or move on, the pub is put \u201cinto play\u201d and its future is at risk.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s worth reading that alongside John Porter\u2019s<\/strong> overview of the SIBA-CAMRA \u2018indie beer\u2019 campaign<\/a> in which a SIBA spokesperson explicitly says \u201cSIBA isn\u2019t arguing for abolition of the beer tie per se\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

We suspect it\u2019s another situation where campaigners pull hard in one direction, the industry pulls hard in the other, and we end up somewhere in the middle \u2013 but perhaps, hopefully, a little closer to the ideal than when we started. But, as the Pub Curmudgeon\u2019s post sets out, it\u2019s all too easy for these disruptions to have effects other than those intended, and for those effects to ripple out for years or decades to come.<\/p>\n

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The other big news this week, at least for those within the world of beer writing, was the death of Martyn Cornell<\/strong>. As his peers and disciples process the news various tributes have begun to emerge, each telling similar stories about how supportive, knowledgeable and generous he was:<\/p>\n