For the benefit of mobile readers who may not have seen it in the sidebar, here’s the poll I created following my earlier post on Two tribes. It will run until Saturday 13th August.
A jaundiced view of life from the darkest recess of the saloon bar...
For the benefit of mobile readers who may not have seen it in the sidebar, here’s the poll I created following my earlier post on Two tribes. It will run until Saturday 13th August.
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"The era of big, bossy, state interference, top-down lever pulling is coming to an end." (David Cameron, 2008)
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." (H. L. Mencken)
"The final nails have now been hammered into the coffin of the freedom to smoke in enclosed public places. This piece of legislation must be one of the most restrictive, spiteful and socially divisive imposed by any British Government." (Lord Stoddart of Swindon)
"Raising taxes on alcohol to prevent problem drinking is akin to raising the price of gasoline to prevent people from speeding." (Edward Peter Stringham)
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." (C. S. Lewis)
"People who deal only in 'craft' beer do not care about some dirty old pub and the dirty old people who are in it and the dirty old community that it holds together." (Boozy Procrastinator)
"The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies." (Robert Conquest)
"A Puritan is someone who lives in mortal fear that somewhere, sometime, someone is enjoying himself." (H. L. Mencken)
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming 'Wow! What a Ride!" (Hunter S. Thompson)
"No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare." (Kingsley Amis)
"When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves,
For you will have lost the last of England." (Hilaire Belloc)
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Any proposals of marriage will be given serious consideration - there must be some cash-strapped drunk cat ladies out there!
If you have a blog that links to this, and is at least vaguely on a political or beer-related theme, drop me a line and I'll add it to my blog list, even if I don't agree with you on everything.
Are we allowed an option - ah, not sure?
ReplyDeletePolls are always best as strict binary options with no fence-sitting option. Like the EU referendum ;-)
DeleteI put no.
ReplyDeleteHow would you define "craft" for one thing?
That's one of the biggest problems - where do you draw the line? Doesn't mean it's not worth drinking, but IMV it shouldn't be something CAMRA actively campaigns for.
DeleteProblem is it is a bit of a grey area. Including with cask. Many breweries tank condition and rack conditioned beer to both cask and keg. So some significant amount of cask is brewery conditioned, a small amount of that even "topped up" with "extraneous CO2".
DeleteThe problem with the whole wider conversation is that practice and technology have rather run their own course leaving the CAMRA frame of reference spluttering in their wake.
And that's just cask I'm thinking of. Keg adds a bunch of other variables - from full keg conditioning to sterile filtering and pasteurisation.
Yes - the elephant in the room (or one of them at least) is that a fair bit of cask beer isn't actually "cask" conditioned.
DeleteWhich is why it doesn't do to get too hung up about the minutiae of definitions. I've always taken the view that, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's reasonable to assume it is a duck.
DeleteCamra should concentrate on Real Ale. Let the hipsters drink their keg muck.
ReplyDelete