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Tag Archives: AB Inbev
Ageing beer, Beer, Beer reviews, Tastings
30th November 2019 Martyn Cornell	16 Comments
Amid all the dodgy news that has hit the American craft beer scene over the past month or so – Founders Brewing Co, the largest in Michigan, having to settle a racial discrimination suit, AB-Inbev stealing the slogan a small brewer has been using for nearly ten years, Lagunitas dumping all over community groups that had been relying on it for fund-raising, Redhook of Seattle finally being swallowed completely, New Belgium of Colorado, the fourth-largest American craft brewery, also losing its independence to a brewing megagiant – one scandalous example of appalling misbehaviour by a big brewer attempting to throw its vast weight around in a morally disgusting fashion seems to have passed by surprisingly unnoticed.
I'm referring to the attempt by AB-InBev – them again – to punish the Chicago-based journalist and author Josh Noel, in total defiance of the values of free speech and honest, upright dealing: the most shocking example of trying to crush commentary you don't like that I can recall in the beer industry.
Josh has been writing about the Chicago beer scene for many years for the city's big newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, and in particular he has been championing Bourbon County Stout, the whiskey-barrel-aged Imperial stout first made by Goose Island Beer Company in the mid-1990s that started an entire new beer style. In 2018 he wrote a book on BCS, Goose Island, and the acquisition of Goose Island by Anheuser-Busch back in 2011 called Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out, subtitled "Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch and how craft beer became big business".
It's one of the very best books on craft beer history I have read – possibly THE best – and one of the best business books I have seen in general. It was deservedly garlanded with the Book of the Year award by the North American Guild of Beer Writers, and if you haven't read it, you really should get yourself a copy right now. It's a thorough, deeply researched, sometimes brutal but totally fair and honest account of the origins and growth of Goose Island since it was founded by businessman John Hall in 1988, looking hard at the pressures that led to the sale of the brewery in 2011, and how and why the brewery, its products and ethos have changed over the decades. AB-Inbev clearly hated it.
I was going to paraphrase what happened after the book came out, but Josh wrote it up so much better than I could in a series of tweets, so here is Josh's story, with occasional interjections by me (and American spellings). We pick it up just after Goose Island has declined to invite him to the annual preview release of the latest iteration of BCS:
"First time in the 10 years I've covered beer for the Chicago Tribune. I was told the brewery 'wasn't comfortable' [mealy-mouthed creeps. Be honest, ye scabs – MC] with me attending. What does that mean? Who wasn't comfortable? Why? They wouldn't explain any of that. How'd we get here? What's happening? Well it began last year.
Goose Island initially didn't invite me to last year's Bourbon County preview either — six months after my book came out. The book was mostly Goose-positive up to its 2011 sale to Anheuser-Busch. Then the story took on a lot more nuance about the brewery and brand in AB's hands.
That change was inevitable thanks to Anheuser-Busch's needs and goals — and why it bought Goose Island in the first place (along with 10 more craft breweries). There was no way around AB's anti-competitive practices, lack of transparency and aim of market domination.
So, faced with not being invited to last year's Bourbon County media preview — something about "needing to have a better working relationship" ["needing you to kiss our bottoms" more like – MC] — I argued I'd been fair and measured. Not always positive. But fair. They ultimately agreed. I attended the tasting. I championed the debut of Bourbon County Wheatwine (which went on to win a FOBAB medal). Didn't much care for Vanilla or Bramble.
I'd been covering Bourbon County since 2010. Back then there was no media tasting. Goose Island was too busy to think much about media at all. Aside from a few dedicated bloggers, very few people were writing about Bourbon County — or craft beer in Chicago at all.
This was the earliest story I wrote about Bourbon County. About the (gasp!) $45 price tag on the first iteration of Rare Bourbon County Stout, in 2010. And year by year, buzz built for the annual Bourbon County release. As time went on, I expressed interest in tasting ahead of the releases, to tell the story of beers changing the beer drinking game in Chicago and beyond. I called Bourbon County Chicago's "most important beer ever."
We did annual tastings, just the brewers and me. It was low-key and very relaxed. In 2015, things changed. Biggest change: Goose and AB went all in on the barrel-aging program, building a gargantuan new barrel-aging warehouse to blow up Goose's barrel-aging program. The brewery also realized it shouldn't just give me and the Chicago Tribune an informal first taste. It should make an event of it. And Goose did. The first "proper" Bourbon County media tasting happened in 2015, at that barrel warehouse. It was a candlelit affair with two tables full of writers, bloggers, podcasters, etc. They've done it every year since, and even expanded it to NYC media.
(Side note: at that 2015 tasting, I believe I was the first person to note what would inevitably be a disastrous infection issue in four of that year's Bourbon County beers. I said Bourbon County Coffee tasted peppery and "off to me." But I digress …)
2015 was also the year that, thanks to the scope and scale of the barrel-aging warehouse, Bourbon County morphed from a lovely boutique product into a national workhorse. (Arguably the entire point of AB buying Goose Island.) Goose Island flooded the market with Bourbon County while also trying to maintain the aura of "exclusivity." A beer called "Rare," for instance, which people had stood in line/paid a premium for in 2015 landed on supermarket shelves a year later.
As part of the Anheuser-Busch machine, Bourbon County became a story beyond what was simply in the bottle. Yet, what was in the bottle also continued to matter. Bourbon County came out every Black Friday. People cared. Some of the beer was outstanding. And every year I reviewed it at Goose Island's annual media preview with others who write about beer.
Meanwhile I wrote that book. And blogged. And found fresh ways to write about barrel-aged beers in Chicago. That included a blind tasting that showed Revolution Brewing surpassing Bourbon County in 2017. Which brings us to this year. Last week I realized I hadn't been invited to this year's Bourbon County tasting. So I reached out and asked what was up. That's when I was told that the brewery "wasn't comfortable" with me attending [translation – senior execs had got a massive snot on about Josh's depiction of AB, and decided he needed to be punished – MC]. I asked for an explanation.
I write for the city's largest newspaper, have written about Bourbon County for 10 years and covered Goose throughout the year, whether beer or marketing. Seems fair to be at that tasting. The issue wasn't about special treatment or favors. It was about getting the same access as other media.
Goose Island came back with a changed story, along the lines of, "Every year there are limited seats and we have to make difficult decisions about who to invite." Clearly untrue [indeed – why do corporations come out with this bullshit when they must know no one believes them and they simply look like shystering liars? MC], but OK, fine. It's their party. I asked for samples of the 2019 Bourbon County beers instead, so that I could taste and review this week along with the others who will be doing so. In return, more corporate speak: "We have allocated a limited number of advance samples to the tasting events and will not be able to fulfill your request at this time."
Blackballed by Goose Island.
Were they disinviting me because of the book? My blog posts? My Tribune coverage? Tweets? My general demeanor and disposition? I don't know. They refused to say. Instead, they're flying off to New York today to do a tasting for media there.
Goose Island can decide not to invite me and the Chicago Tribune to its Bourbon County media tasting for whatever reason. Its choice. But we dictate our coverage — not the people and companies we write about."
Yes, exactly. There are two big issues here. The first is simple liberty of discussion. AB InBev is attempting to punish someone for saying things it doesn't like. The company's executives need to have a copy of the Fourth First Amendment to the US Constitution poked hard into their faces: "The Freedom of Speech, and of the Press … shall not be infringed." (Addendum – just to explain, I don't meant it's illegal for AB InBev to ban Josh, I mean it's utterly against the spirit of the values the country they operate in was founded upon.) The second is an important, and surprisingly little-discussed, aspect of the implied contract between sellers and buyers. If you are asking the public to give you its money for your goods and services, then there is a moral right, which you as a seller cannot and should not attempt to take away, for commentators to express their view on whether or not the exchange you are proposing – my money for your product – is a fair one. In other words, for any proposed sale/purchase, there is a right to review and to criticise which should not be suppressed, most importantly because that right is a counter-balance to the power of the seller, and acts in defence of the buyer. That applies to everything offered for sale, from theatrical performances to automobiles to beer. For AB Inbev to attempt to take that right to criticise and comment away from Josh is a morally wrong move, which should be called out, and for which the company should be ashamed.
So: given I feel so strongly about what has happened to Josh, how come, you are entitled to ask, I attended TWO events this month in London organised by Goose Island/AB InBev, one celebrating the Obadiah Poundage recreation stout, the other for the UK launch of BCS, swallowed its beers (for free) and ate its pizza (for free)? Hypocritical, much? Should I not, rather than enjoying the warmth of the company's East End bar and brewhouse, have been outside in the November cold waving a placard that declared: "I stand with Josh Noel: Boycott Goose Island!" and attempting to persuade fellow beer writers not to cross my picket line?
Um. Maybe. But ultimately, no, I think, and for a host of reasons. The first, and not the least, is that boycotting AB Inbev, is, as the old joke goes, like pissing myself in a dark suit: it might give me a warm feeling, but nobody else would notice. AB InBev wouldn't have cared, certainly. Virtue signalling to no effect doesn't help anybody. Second, for the first event, certainly, I was there to support several old pals, notably Ron Pattinson and Derek Prentice, who were involved in the Obadiah Poundage project, which I wrote about here, (Before you ask, I was sent a case of the beer beforehand. What's it like? More Bretty, and rather sweeter, than I was expecting: not a beer that you absolutely have to rush out to buy, but a fascinating experiment, and worth picking up if you see it.)
For the second event, the London launch of BCS, I was there out of extreme curiosity, having never drunk the beer before, and unsure when I would ever get the chance to again: if you write about beer, passing up the chance to drink the beer that started the whole, now massive, barrel-aged movement, in a fit of politically correct solidarity with a fellow journalist who was barred from a press call but, let's put this in perspective, not actually blown up seems to be to be, well, unnecessary.
I know there are beer writers who eschew any involvement with corporate freebies, but my argument has always been that I'm very happy to accept free stuff, from beer to trips abroad, when it enables me to put information in front of my readers that I would not be otherwise able to give them. Certainly I do not believe I have ever held the boot back because someone had dropped off a case of beer. Carlsberg, for example, paid me to appear in one of their corporate videos, flew me to Copenhagen three times, took me to Twickenham and Wembley to see the national rugby and football teams play and stuffed me to my eyebrows with food and drink on multiple occasions, but that didn't prevent me from being very rude about the new-look green-label pilsner earlier this year.
As it happens the Federal Trade Commission in the US has just issued a leaflet, "Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers", about openness in blog posts, tweets, Instagram posts and the like, which you can see here. It says:
"If you endorse a product through social media, your endorsement message should make it obvious when you have a relationship ("material connection") with the brand. A "material connection" to the brand includes a personal, family, or employment relationship or a financial relationship – such as the brand paying you or giving you free or discounted products or services.
Telling your followers about these kinds of relationships is important because it helps keep your recommendations honest and truthful, and it allows people to weigh the value of your endorsements.
As an influencer, it's your responsibility to make these disclosures, to be familiar with the Endorsement Guides, and to comply with laws against deceptive ads. Don't rely on others to do it for you."
Which I think is entirely fair enough – and if you're thinking "I don't live in the US," the FTC's guide also points out: "If posting from abroad, US law applies if it's reasonably foreseeable that the post will affect US consumers."
So on that basis: what were those free Bourbon County Stouts you drank like, Martyn? Very fine indeed, actually: this IS a beer you really need to track down and try. It's massively filled with flavours, something to sip, savour and enjoy, and also, judging by the differences between the 2018 and 2019, a beer that will change in fascinating ways as it ages: the 2018, for example, was very much less coconutty than the 2019, as, clearly, the influence of the wood in the Bourbon barrel began to fade. I also greatly enjoyed two beers made at the Shoreditch brewhouse (which, incidentally, is barely a hundred yards from what was once Harwood's Bell brewhouse, famous, incorrectly, for supposedly being the place where porter was first brewed). One was a madeira-cask-aged doppelbock, served straight from the cask it was aged in, which was wonderfully rich, the other a sour cherry and tonka bean porter, like black forest gateau in a glass.
OK, you may passionately loathe AB InBev, and vow never to approach it or its works except with a pitchfork and a flaming torch. But the unpleasant arseholes at the top of the company who decided, stupidly and unforgiveably, that Josh Noel had to be punished for not placing his nose as far up the AB InBev bottom as they wished are not the very many thousands of people who work for the company, who are doing the best jobs they can, and who are producing beers like that sour cherry porter, and that Madeira-cask-aged doppelbock, and those iterations of BCS, and those projects like Obadiah Poundage porter, and I believe THOSE people SHOULD be supported. But supporting them doesn't mean not being as rude as possible about the bad things corporate AB InBev gets up to, and calling the company out on it as loudly as I can.
(Addendum 2: I meant to say, but forgot, so I'm saying it now, that as a fine example of how quickly myths arrive and take root, on both the embossed bottles that Bourdon County stout now comes in, and the T-shirts that Goose Island/AB InBev gives away, the claim is made that BCS was first brewed in 1992. This appears to be down to Greg Hall, who invented the beer, being unable to remember more than a decade later when he had had the dinner with the legendary Bourbon maestro Booker Noe that led to the beer's creation. It was, as Josh Noel uncovered while researching his book, in 1995, not 1992.)
AB InbevBourbon Country StoutGoose IslandhypocrisyJosh Noel
Beer, Beer advertising, Beer styles, Beer trivia, History of beer
The land where working-class men drink milk stout from quart bottles, and the curious case of Mackeson porter
5th July 2019 Martyn Cornell	12 Comments
It's a beer fact guaranteed to make British drinkers boggle in disbelief: one of the biggest selling beer styles among black working-class South African men is milk stout
You won't believe it, Ena …
While milk stout has seen a tiny renaissance in the UK, with craft beer brewers producing examples of the style, it is still mostly thought of, if it is though of at all, as the beer drunk by little old ladies sitting in the saloon bar on their own. The last person in Britain to be known for drinking milk stout was Ena Sharples, sour-faced harridan of the soap opera Coronation Street, who disappeared from television screens almost 40 years ago.
In South Africa, however, milk stout has a totally different image: Castle Milk Stout, originally a South African Breweries brand and now, since it acquired SAB, owned by AB InBev, is a long-time favourite of black workers, and is now being marketed at the country's black middle class as the beer to drink to show you haven't lost touch with your roots. (Great ad, that – possibly one of the best beer ads ever.)
The first ever ad for Castle Milk Stout, from 1912
Stout and porter had been popular in South Africa from the earliest days of British colonisation, but by the start of the 20th century lager was starting to take over. However, variants on stout were appearing in South Africa, such as oatmeal stout, which was made by several firms, including South African Breweries, which advertised its Castle oatmeal stout in 1916 as providing "health and strength for tired people," and Chandler's Crown brewery in Ophirton, Johannesburg, which was still advising customers in 1932 to "Drink Chandler's Oatmeal Stout and keep colds away!" There was also the peculiar-sounding and short-lived Marrow Stout (bone marrow or vegetable marrow, it is not clear which) brewed by the Thoma (sic) brewery in Johannesburg (founded in 1892 by a German, August Thoma, in Braamfontein, Johannesburg and taken over by Ohlsson's Cape Breweries in 1902), which was first advertised in the Rand Daily Mail in 1909 but does not appear again after 1910.
Marrow stout … no, I've no idea either
However, just as "marrow stout" was disappearing, a new style of stout appeared that would turn South Africa into one of the biggest stout-drinking countries in the world. Sweet stout had been growing increasingly popular, but as the beer aged it lost its sweetness. The idea of brewing stout with a dose of unfermentable lactose sugar, derived from milk, to keep it staying sweet, had been first patented by William Melhuish, a food chemist from Poole, Dorset, in 1908, and the first "milk stout" was brewed by the English brewer Mackeson's of Hythe, in Kent, in 1909. Mackeson licensed other brewers to make their own milk stouts, and the Castle brewery launched its version in August 1912 with a full-page advertisement in the Rand Daily Mail. Castle Milk Stout became one of the company's biggest selling beers, particularly after a ban on black South Africans drinking "European" beers, imposed in 1928, was lifted in 1962.
The appeal of the six per cent abv drink to black South Africans, according to the South African advertising guru Happy Ntshingila, was that the traditional sorghum beer which was all they were legally allowed to drink during those years has always been regarded as a food as well as an alcoholic drink, and the "milk" part of milk stout gave it the same image. By the 1990s milk stout in South Africa was primarily a drink of blue-collar Nguni men – members of the Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele and other South African peoples. The beer was frequently sold in quart bottles, for sharing, the way a calabash of sorghum beer would be shared, and was described as "the most physically masculine brand in the SAB stable." It was about as far from the image that milk stout drinkers had in the beer's country of origin – elderly ladies sipping a half-pint in the pub on their own—as it was possible to travel.
Mackeson Porter ad, Rand Daily Mail July 19 1969
The large market for milk stout in South Africa did not go unnoticed in Chiswell Street, the London headquarters of Whitbread, the company that had acquired Mackeson in 1929. However, when the British brewer launched the Mackeson brand in South Africa in 1967, it was as Mackeson Porter, not Mackeson Milk Stout. This, the first launch of a beer under the name "porter" by a British brewer since, probably, the 19th century, was most likely because South African Breweries had a local trade mark monopoly on the use of the expression "milk stout": there had been other milk stouts in South Africa besides the one from Castle, including Ohlsson's Lion "melk stout", as it was branded in Afrikaans, which was still being sold in 1952, but SAB had acquired Ohlsson's in 1954. (In the UK the term "milk stout" had been voluntarily abandoned by brewers for fear that legislation would be introduced to ban it anyway.) Mackeson Porter was on sale in South Africa until 1972 before disappearing, unable, without the world "milk stout" on the label, to make any impact on a market that had not seen a beer called "porter" for generations.
Castle Milk Stout 'chocolate infused'
Early in the 1990s, after the government of South Africa unbanned the African National Congress, and with black Africans increasingly drinking lager rather than milk stout, South African Breweries gave the advertising brief for Castle Milk Stout to the country's first all-black ad agency, HerdBuoys. A series of advertisements that successfully combined images of black urban success with rural tradition—and milk stout drinking—sent sales soaring again, to 100,000 hectolitres (84,000 US barrels) a year. By 2003, Castle Milk Stout was the fourth biggest liquor brand in South Africa, and the second biggest stout brand in the world. Its production still included roast malt added in the mash tun, unlike Guinness, which had long gone over to using an extract of roasted barley, added post-mash, and other tweaks peculiar to making Castle Milk Stout, including adding caramel alongside the lactose, crash-cooling the fermentation to encourage the yeast to produce stop the yeast mopping up diacetyl, which increases the "butterscotch" flavours in the beer, and a lager-like maturation at -2ºC.
Castle Milk Stout clan can
By 2011 Castle Milk Stout was available in a nitrogenated draft version, though it is still most often found in 75cl bottles and in cans. However, in the winter of 2014 SAB introduced "ultra-smooth" milk stout in a nitrogenated can, and also a limited-edition "chocolate-infused" 4.5 per cent abv version of Castle Milk Stout, which came back as a regular variant the following year, again available in 75cl bottles. This, together with "repositioning" the brand as a "premium" product, and whites picking up on the brand as the growth of craft beer made them more aware of "unusual" beer styles, helped push sales up 14 per cent year-on-year. It has still been maintaining its "traditional" image in South Africa, however, with promotions that included printing tribal clan names, and clan praise songs, on the cans. The brand has also moved abroad, capturing market share from Guinness in Nigeria, where stout makes up 14 per cent of the beer market, and also being brewed in Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda and even South Korea.
It's a long way from Ena Sharples.
AB InbevCastle Milk StoutEna Sharplesmilk stoutSouth Africa
Beer, Beer business, Beer industry, Beer news, Beer nonsense, Beer reviews, Beer styles, Bottled beer
Carlsberg's new lager: the verdict is in and it's 'This is NOT the future of beer'
14th May 2019 Martyn Cornell	13 Comments
A few years back, when I was still involved in hospitality trade journalism, I would get occasional invites from Carlsberg to PR gigs. One was to Wembley to see England play San Marino. The match itself was the predictable turkey-stuffing (5-0) but it was the entertainment beforehand we were particularly supposed to appreciate: Northampton's Danes had taken over part of Wembley town hall and turned it into an "If Carlsberg did pubs" pub, with unlimited free pints of lager delivered on sushi-style conveyor belts, the Lightning Seeds as the pub band and Ian Wright, Paddy McGuinness and Jeff Stelling as pre-match pundits. It was quite fun, as quite fun goes, but the big drawback was the beer: Carlsberg.
Carlsberg's rfevamped "Danish pilsner' in a glass older than the marketer who thought it was a great idea to drop the word 'lager' from the product
I don't have anything against big-corporation beer in itself, but I do have a big problem with dull beer: I can't drink it. I have a very low boredom threshold with food and drink (and most other experiences, actually) and I would literally rather drink nothing than drink more than a couple of pints of beer with no interest. And that Carlsberg: it wasn't actually bad, or faulty, it was simply a cypher, a blank hole where beer should have been. There was no pain in drinking it, but it was a hedonistic vacuum that actively repelled me, that made me not wish to experience this beery nothing.
The one upside, I thought, was that at least I wasn't going to get embarrassingly drunk on free beer, since I couldn't bring myself to bring it near my mouth. So I waited, faintly bored, until the drinking was over and we could go and watch the match – which was a similar sort of experience to the beer, ironically. Had it been a ten-nil walloping, that would have been good to watch. Had it been decent opposition, that would have been good, too. But five-nil against San Marino, a country with a population the size of Letchworth: meh.
So: come forward to the present day, and the Cobblertown-based Danes are now apparently admitting that, indeed, their beer really hasn't been up to much: the San Marino of beerdom. In the run-up to a relaunch last month of the basic 3.8 per cent abv "Green" Carlsberg, the company started retweeting tweets from drinkers comparing the beer to drinking stale breadsticks, or the bathwater your granny died in, using the increasingly popular "beat us, we're bad" strategy marketeers seem to think makes consumers love them because they're apparently being deeply honest, for a change. Then its VP of marketing in the UK, Liam Newton, pulled on the sackcloth, dumped a pile of ashes over his head, threw himself on his knees and wailed: "At Carlsberg UK, we lost our way. We focused on brewing quantity, not quality; we became one of the cheapest, not the best. In order to live up to our promise of being 'probably the best beer in the world', we had to start again." Actually, Liam, you used to say "Probably the best lager in the world", you little fibber, not least because prosodically the two beats of "lager" make for a better-sounding slogan that the single beat of beer: cretic, trochee, spondee, cretic rather than the clunkier cretic, cretic, cretic,
Green Carlsberg is now calling itself a Danish pilsner, rather than a lager: presumably "consumer feedback" suggests "pilsner" sounds posher. Poor Bhavya Mandanna, head brewperson at Carlsberg UK, ventriloquised the following nonsense, courtesy of Carlsberg's PR people: "Our new Pilsner has a fuller body and a perfect balance of bitterness and sweetness made possible through modifications to our brewing process and the addition of bittering hops in the brewhouse." Wow, they're adding bittering hops in the brewhouse! There's innovative! Tell us more, Bhavya, and let's see if you can say it while the PR man sits you in his knee with his hand up the back of your jacket as he swallows a pint of supposedly perfectly balanced lager: "Aroma hops with citrus and floral top notes give a greater depth of flavour whilst maintaining the light and refreshing qualities of Carlsberg."
Enough guff. Just because PR people make it appear you're as filled with marketing bollocks as they are, it doesn't mean you're automatically a bad brewer. It's only fair to put Bhavya's new-style Green Carlsberg in a taste-off to see how it performs. I decided to pair it against Camden Town's new "Weeknite Any Day" lager, a 3 per cent beer I suspect only escaped being called "Everyday lager" because that would have given the Portman Group the blue giptions for suggesting you could drink every day. And the result is (the envelope, please …)
The result, I'm actually disappointed to say, is exactly what a cynic might expect. The "new" Green Carlsberg, selling for £1 a 33cl bottle in your local corner offie (that's £1.72 a pint), is scarcely less dull than its previous incarnation. It smells of almost nothing. It tastes of almost nothing. There's a faintly meaty, metallic aftertaste that lingers for too long. More flavour comes through as the beer opens up in the glass, but so does a bitterness just hovering on the edge of unpleasant. A slight malt sweetness is present, but the main sensation is of something massively watered down. I'm bored even thinking about it.This is NOT the future of beer, and Carlsberg are only wasting time on what should be a controlled rundown of a beer in terminal decline.
Camden Week Nite: is this AB Inbev's secret weapon in the fruity lager war?
Camden Town's Week Nite, though, is a little bit of a revelation. It's one of a growing number of what might be called "floral" or "fruity" lagers, cold-fermented beers made with hop varieties more normally associated with warm-fermented American IPAs: Galaxy, a strongly flavoured Australian hop with lots of tropical fruit/peach aromas, Topaz, another Australian hop, with hints of clove and lychee and Mosaic, from the US, with more tropical/floral/citrus flavours – that are becoming increasingly popular – see, for example, Guinness's Hop House 13, very likely to be already on a bar top near you just three years after its launch.
What this new style of lager is delivering is taste, something that, 20 years after the American IPA revolution, is finally becoming a mainstream demand, plus "cold refreshingness"' something beers such as Carlsberg once had tied up and held down on the ground, but which is no longer enough. What Week Nite is delivering as well is relatively low alcohol: it used to be that a three per cent beer would have to be made with roasted or high-dried malts, like a brown ale or a dark mild or a sweet stout, to deliver flavour. Brewers are now discovering that it is possible to deliver flavour in a low-gravity beer with American-heritage hops:
Week Nite has Motueka, a New Zealand hop with Saaz in its family tree but also NZ hops to give a distinctly tropical fruits aroma, and Centennial, one of the classic American "C-hops", adding more citrus flavours, as whirlpool hops, and it is then dry-hopped with Motueca and Centennial again, plus Cascade, another citrussy American C-hop, and left unfiltered and unpasteurised – but moves likely to increase the flavour in a low-gravity beer. The result is a somewhat austere beer with a restrained mango, physalis and passionfruit nose, mango juice in the mouth, just enough bitterness to hold it all up and the body of an ultra-marathon runner: not so much thin as wiry. That sounds harsher than I mean to be on this beer: for a three per cent alcohol brew it stands up very well, and it should hit the target market, people wanting something tasty that won't lay them out, right in the eye. The 33cl can represents exactly one UK unit of alcohol: pace yourself and you could drink one of these every 40 minutes while staying totally sober.
You don't have to stare too deeply into a beer-filled crystal ball to predict that (1) there will be a constant flow of launches of floral/fruity lagers, in the wake of Hop House 13, and (2) this poses big problems for the "standard" lager giants, who can't reformat their existing beers, for fear of alienating their existing drinkers, but who are not recruiting new drinkers in enough numbers to maintain market share. The "lager louts" of the 1980s are now, to revive an old joke, becoming Saga louts, 30 years on, as they close in on their 60s, and nobody aged 18 wants to drink the beer a 60-year-old drinks. It looks like Carlsberg's pet British micro, London Fields, has already had an attempt at a "fruity" lager with the launch of Broadway Boss, using a "traditional" hop in the boil but "a new American variety in the whirlpool to give it a lemony zing." Unfortunately the whole first batch has had to be recalled after high levels of DMS in the final product, but they'll be back …
What, then, do AB InBev and Heineken do, with so much invested in Stella, Budweiser, Fosters and the rest? Will we see the launch of Stella floral, of Fosters fruity, or will they try new brands entirely, using, perhaps, their recently acquired "craft" breweries as cover? Those of you at the back shouting "Camden Town is owned by AB InBev!" – yes, exactly. What we have here with Week Nite is a floral/fruity toe in the lager by AB InBev's marketers, to see if anybody bites. If it doesn't work, no problem: no embarrassment for the big brands. If it does, then woo-hoo, roll that baby out round the distribution network.
And on cue, *ding* into my email intray today comes a release from Shepherd Neame about its new Bear Island Triple Hopped Lager, hopped with Saaz, pretty much the standard "noble" lager hop, from Bohemia, somewhat herby, but also Challenger, a British hop with a touch of orange marmalade, and, that one again, Mosaic, for the floral/tropical/citrus delivery. There'll be plenty more along soon.
AB InbevAmerican hopsCamden TownCarlsbergDanish pilsnerLagerLondon FieldsWeek Nite lager
Ageing beer, Beer, Beer ingredients, Beer myths, Beer news, Beer styles, Brewing beer, History of beer, malt
AB Inbev's new 1840 London porter and the hornbeam question
25th April 2019 Martyn Cornell	14 Comments
I am green – viridian. Ron Pattinson has been dropping hints every time I see him about his secret big new project with Goose Island in Chicago, and it's now been revealed: a reproduction of a London porter from 1840, including authentic heritage barley, properly "blown" brown malt, and blending a long-vatted beer with a much younger version. Who do I have to kill to get hold of a bottle?
Of course, some people have knee-jerked in and slapped this down because it involves the Evil Empire, AB InBev, owner of Goose Island and, in the opinion of many, too many other formerly small craft breweries, from Four Peaks to Wicked Weed. The PC line is "I'll never drink anything produced by a company that is fundamentally bad for, and opposed to, small independent operators and their survival."
As it happens, I've just finished reading Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out Josh Noel's deservedly award-winning book from last year on the take-over of Goose Island by Anheuser-Busch – do try to get hold of a copy, it's an excellent, even-handed and sympathetic analysis of what happened and why it happened. You'll certainly put it down after 345 pages and conclude that AB InBev is indeed interested in nothing more, ultimately, than getting you to buy its product in preference to anybody else's, and if that meant using its weight, wealth and power to crush the entire global craft beer scene, it wouldn't care. But that's what big corporations do: criticising them for wanting to dominate the world is like criticising lions for chasing down and killing wildebeest. It's the nature of the animal. Run faster, wildebeest.
Ron Pattinson outside the Anchor, Southwark, about all that remains of the former Barclay Perkins brewery, once the largest in the world
And if AB InBev wants to spend silly sums of money flying my mate Ron, and Derek Prentice, former brewer with Truman's of Brick Lane, then Young's, then Fuller's, and now Wimbledon, out to Chicago to advise on recreating an almost 180-year-old beer, and take enormous pains getting the ingredients and the methodology just right, in the hope that this will greenwash their corporation and get people like me to write admiringly about them, rather than attack them for trying to squeeze smaller rivals out of the market, then they're partly correct: I'll still criticise where necessary, but I'm also writing admiringly about the Obadiah Poundage porter project, because I think it's wonderful to be able to drink this beer from the past, and I don't believe very many other organisations would have the big wallet, or the commitment, to undertake such a recreation. This is an expensive beer made with unusual ingredients back in March last year, which was then left sitting around occupying valuable real estate in Chicago for a year before being blended with the newer version and put on sale. Most companies' accountants would have been screaming themselves puce. If not AB InBev, who else would undertake such a journey?
Anyway, watch this fascinating 20-minute video about the project, listen to Mike Siegel, research and development boss at Goose Island explain it all, see if you can spot John Hall, founder of Goose Island, popping into shot uncredited occasionally, and then come back here and I'll discuss a few interesting points that arise, so pay attention and listen out in particular for the mentions of hornbeam, there will be questions afterwards.
CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO
Derek Prentice, brewer at Truman's in Brick Lane in the East End of London51 years ago, compares the street scene of today with that of 1841
I didn't expect to find anything to criticise about the history when I watched that. I nodded along as Derek Prentice accurately recounted the role of porters in 18th century London, and as Ron described the change from the all-brown-malt porters of the early 18th century to the more complicated grain bills of later porters, with pale malt, "patent" black malt and "blown" malt dried and browned over faggots of hornbeam wood, and I sat awed as Andrea Stanley of Valley Malt in Massachusetts showed the making of just such a batch of "blown" malt over a fire of hornbeam. And then something strange happened. My subconscious popped up and said: "Hornbeam – are you actually certain about that?" So I checked.
For the past 18 months I've been writing what is meant to be the definitive history of porter and stout, and I've read several hundred books and articles to pull that together. All that information goes down into the subconscious, where, as is the way of the human brain, new connections are formed that the conscious mind is unaware of until something bubbles up from the id. Now, "maltsters made blown malt for porter by drying the grains over blazing hornbeam" is a solid received fact among historians of brewing. I never doubted it. Hough, Briggs and Stevens's Malting and Brewing Science from 1971 says so: "dried in a fierce heat from a fire of hardwood faggots made from oak, hornbeam, ash or beech" (p166). Steeped in Tradition, a history of the malting industry from 1983 by Jonathan Brown says so: "These kilns were fired by wood, mostly and preferably oak, but beech, hornbeam and ash were also commonly used." It makes sense: blown malt was a speciality of the maltsters of Ware and other towns in East Hertfordshire, and hornbeam, which burns with a bright, hot flame, is abundant in the woods of East Herts.
Grain being dried at high temperature over a hornbeam fire at Valley Malt in Massachusetts to make 'blown' or 'snapped' malt
But as my subconscious prompted me into confirming, if you go and look, you will not actually find any references to hornbeam being used by maltsters during the time that blown malt was still being made. Many authors do not specify any particular wood. Of those that do, William Black in his Practical Treatise on Brewing of 1844 says blown malt is heated with "faggots of dry, hard wood, commonly beech or birch; fir imparting a tarry taste." (p26). Henry Stopes, who was the 19th century's Mr Malt, spoke only of billet and faggot wood "generally of oak but occasionally of beech" in making the blown variety (Malt and Malting, 1885, p159). E.R. Southby's Systemic Handbook of Practical Brewing from the same year says blown malt is "dried rapidly over a fire of beech or birch wood" (p215). Herbert Edwards Wright's A Handy Book for Brewers from 1892 says blown malt is made by subjecting the barley to "a sudden blast of intense heat generated by heating up the kiln fire with oak or beechen faggots or billets" (p309). (Wright also says that the fire risk "and the high rates of insurance demanded in consequence" meant this was a variety of malt generally made only by specialists.)
So, what to say to Ron, Derek, Andrea and Mike: "Er, thanks for all the trouble you went to, guys, that was amazing, especially the hornbeam, but, um, you might have been better off with beech …" I'm not saying nobody ever used hornbeam to make blown malt: I think it's very likely they did. It was available, in the right place, and has similar characteristics to both birch (which is in the same botanical family) and beech, which we DO known were used (indeed, the hornbeam is known in some parts of Britain as the "ay beech", for its habit of keeping its leaves through winter, that is "for aye".)
Mike Siegel, r&d manager at Goose Island, tries some Obadiah Poundage at the brewery's barrel ageing warehouse. Where's mine?
Best not to say anything to dampen the party, really. And let's not mention that the American hornbeam that Andrea used is a slightly different species to English hornbeam: that would be taking my (deserved) reputation for picky pedanticism too far down the road. Nor let us question why an 1840 porter is named for a man who probably died at least 70 years earlier, the pseudonymous commentator whose letter to the London Chronicle in 1760 about the tax on beer provides historians with so much information about the history of porter. (Someone in the film wonders where the original "Obadiah Poundage" got his name from: "Poundage" is an old word for tax, and one of the many Obadiahs in the Old Testament was a porter "keeping the ward " [Nehemiah 12:25].) And please, let's not ask why you have to query every single damned received historical fact because too often what you thought was indisputably true isn't indisputably true at all. No, there's a much more important question than all that: where's my bottle?
AB InbevDerek PrenticeGoose IslandhornbeamJohn HallMike SiegelObadiah PoundageporterRon Pattinson
Beer, Beer business, Beer styles, History of beer, Uncategorised
Will Big Lager one day go the same way as Big Porter?
8th May 2016 Martyn Cornell	16 Comments
I gave a talk at the Victorian Society's "Beer and Brewing Study Day" yesterday in the Art Workers' Guild building in Bloomsbury on "The Decline and Fall of Heavy Wet", "heavy wet" being a 19th century slang expression for porter. I described how in 1843 the Scottish journalist William Weir called porter "the most universally favoured liquor the world has ever known," and declared that "porter drinking needs but a beginning: wherever the habit has once been acquired, it is sure to be kept up." But even then, the dark, hoppy, bitter beer that had been a favourite of everybody from dockers to dukes for more than a hundred years was in decline, losing sales to mild ale, a sweeter pale drink. Within 40 years mild ale had completely eclipsed porter as the favourite style of most beer drinkers, and mild was to remain number one until the 1960s – when it too, was turfed off the throne. The beer that replaced it, however, bitter, had barely three decades at number one before falling to the growing popularity of lager, which became the biggest seller in the 1990s. And I finished with this question for the audience: is there any reason why Big Lager should not, one day, follow Big Porter – and Big Mild – into oblivion?
Tom and Bob order quarts of heavy wet at a club for coal heavers (note the fantail hats, which hang down at the rear and protect the wearer's jacket from the coaldust from the sacks they carry on their backs: the president of the assembly, on the far left, has turned his hat around) – from the anonymously written Real Life in London, 1821
Big Porter really was big. Those who brewed it became astonishingly wealthy. Samuel Johnson was talking about the opportunities available to the purchaser of a London porter brewery when he spoke about becoming "rich beyond the dreams of avarice". Samuel Whitbread, who ran one of the capital's biggest porter breweries, in Chiswell Street, was "said to have been worth a million at least" when he died in 1796, according to the Gentleman's Magazine, a fortune equivalent to perhaps £1.5 billion today. The porter brewers' wealth brought them considerable influence: all seven of the biggest London breweries had multiple members of parliament among their partners.
Samuel Whitbread, porter brewer, worth £1m in 18th century money
In 1823, porter output in London hit 1.8 million barrels, after a continual rise that had lasted 50 years. But this was its peak: by 1830 porter production would be down 20 per cent on its 1823 level. What was replacing it was mild ale, made for quick consumption, slightly stronger than porter, pale in colour, unaged and therefore sweeter, less acid than porter. A House of Commons select committee on the sale of beer in 1833 was told that the London drinker "will have nothing but what is mild, and that has caused a considerable revolution in the trade, so much so that Barclay and Perkins, and other great houses, finding that there is a decrease in the consumption of porter, and an increase in the consumption of ale, have gone into the ale trade; nearly all the new trade is composed of mild ale."
In the early 19th century, ale brewers and beer (that is to say, porter and stout) brewers were still different concerns in London, with the ale brewers much smaller than their rivals. But as the demand for ale grew, so the ale brewers grew too, boosting companies such as Charrington in the Mile End Road and Courage at Horsleydown on the south bank of the Thames, almost opposite the Tower. Charrington's trade increased almost 2 1/2 times between 1831 and 1851, for example. In 1814 it was producing just 16,510 barrels a year, all ale, when Barclay Perkins, then London's leading brewer, was making 257,300 barrels of porter: by 1889 Charrington's output had risen to more than 500,000 barrels a year, level with Barclay Perkins.
A couple of ads for Charrington's XX ale in 1829 this is pale ale in the earlier sense of a lightly hopped but strong pale malt liquor, not the heavily hopped India Pale Ale: these ads are actually from an Australian newspaper
The porter brewers responded by moving into the ale market, particularly after the Beerhouse Act of 1830 dramatically increased the number of available licensed outlets. Whitbread, then the third or fourth biggest brewer in London, whose production was entirely porter up to 1834, started brewing mild ale in 1835. Ale quickly rose from nowhere to more than 10 per cent of Whitbread's production by 1839, and more than 20 per cent by 1859, when Whitbread's porter sales had dropped by almost 30 per cent compared to 25 years earlier. At Truman's, then fighting with Barclay Perkins to be London's biggest brewer, the swing from porter was stronger still, with ale making up 30 per cent of production by 1859.
Continue reading Will Big Lager one day go the same way as Big Porter? →
AB InbevBirra del BorgobitterCamden Townheavy wetLagermildporterpunditryReidTrumanWhitbread
Beer, Beer industry, Craft beer, Uncategorised
AB InBev acquires Camden Town: least surprising news in the history of beer
23rd December 2015 Martyn Cornell	18 Comments
I was actually speaking to a senior London brewer about something else entirely on Monday when he asked me if I had heard that AB InBev had bought the Camden Town Brewery, and my instant response was: "That's the least surprising news I've ever heard."
Jasper Cuppaidge, evil mustachio-twirling villain – that is, if you believe Twitter …
Camden Town has always seemed to me the Brewery Most Likely to Sell Out to a Big Buyer – certainly since its beers started appearing on bartops all over London. It's got a great brand name, picking up the associations of a part of the capital that is somehow, at least in its image, gritty, urban, young, trendy and authentic all at the same time (possibly relevant trivia: Camden is where Scrooge's clerk Bob Cratchit and his family lived, which suggests the place has had a reputation for cheery grittiness since Dickens's time).
But it ought to be expected that the brewery is a great brand: founder Jasper Cuppaidge is married to the daughter of Sir John Hegarty, a partner in Bartle Bogle Hegarty, one of Britain's most renowned advertising people, the man who gave us Vorsprung Durch Technik and Nick Kamen stripping to his boxers in a launderette to advertise Levi's, and who is – or was – Camden Town's chairman. If Hegarty and his ad world pals didn't stump up the initial funding that allowed Cuppaidge to install all that shiny brewing kit from Germany's Braukon in a Kentish Town railway arch in 2010, then I WOULD be surprised. And if there wasn't always the possibility of a trade sale in the business plan, I'd be pretty surprised there too. (More trivia: Hegarty apparently designed Camden Town's logo, with the horseshoe shape a nod to the Horseshoe in Hampstead where Cuppaidge started brewing)
Continue reading AB InBev acquires Camden Town: least surprising news in the history of beer →
AB InbevBrewDogCamden TownJames WattJason CuppaidgeMeantime Brewing CompanySAB Miller
Beer, Beer news, Brewery history
Goodbye to the last of London's million-barrel breweries
3rd December 2015 Martyn Cornell	4 Comments
Flag on the top of the Mortlake brewery 1932
It is one of history's ironies that just as London hits more breweries than at any time in the past 110 years, its brewing capacity is more than halved with the closure of the last of the capital's remaining megabreweries, at Mortlake.
That the brewery at Mortlake, which has been pumping out hundreds of thousands of barrels a year of Budweiser for the past two decades, should have survived to be at least 250 years old this year is remarkable: it lost its independent in 1889, and the guillotine has been poised above its neck for the past six years.
The Mortlake site, famous as the home of Watney's Red Barrel, was one of eight huge breweries still operating in London in the mid-1970s, which between them made one in every five pints drunk in Britain. Four closed between 1975 and 1982: Charrington's in Mile End, Whitbread's on the northern edge of the City, Mann's in Whitechapel and Courage by Tower Bridge. Truman's brewery shut in Brick Lane in 1989, and Ind Coope in Romford in 1992. In 2005, Guinness closed the Park Royal brewery. With the shuttering of Young's in 2006 (yes, I know there's still brewing on the site, but it's not a commercial operation), in 2007 brewery numbers in London hit what was almost an all-time low, of just 10.
It's instructive to see how brewery numbers have fluctuated over the past 300 years: Continue reading Goodbye to the last of London's million-barrel breweries →
AB InbevAnheuser-BuschBudweiserHalfordKempsonMortlake breweryPhillips & WiganTophamWatney'sWatney's SpecialWeatherstone
Beer, Beer news, Rants
The Bass red triangle: things AB-InBev won't tell you
28th June 2013 Martyn Cornell	95 Comments
There are stupid marketeers, and there's AB-InBev. The Belgo-Brazilians have decided to rename one of the oldest beer brands in Britain, Bass pale ale, a literally iconic IPA, as "Bass Trademark Number One". It's a move so clueless, so lacking in understanding of how beer drinkers relate to the beers they drink, I have no doubt it will be held up to MBA students in five years' time as a classic example of How To Royally Screw Up Your Brand.
The move is predicated upon the red triangle that is found on every bottle of Bass pale ale, and on every pumpclip of the draught version, being the first registered trademark in Britain. The generally accepted story is that after the passing of the Trade Mark Registration Act of 1875, when applications to apply for trademark registration opened on January 1, 1876, a Bass employee was sent to wait overnight outside the registrar's office the day before in order to be the first in line to file to register a trademark the next morning, and that is why the company has trade mark number one. There is no evidence for this story: but it is certainly true that a label with the triangle on it, and the words "Bass & Co's Pale Ale" is indeed the UK's Trade Mark 1, having been the first to be registered on New Year's Day 1876.
So why now rename a beer that has been around since the 1820s, when Bass first started brewing a bitter pale ale for the Far East market, after an event that happened when that beer was already 50 or more years old? Because AB-InBev is flailing around for a way to rescue the beer, once the most famous in the world, from the miserable position it has been in since, to be honest, long before what was then Interbrew acquired the Bass brands in 2000. Some idiot marketing focus group got together and tried to think of a unique selling point for the beer: and the only one they could come up with was that it bore the UK's first registered trade mark.
As Pete Brown has already remarked, this is pretty much a result of the AB-InBev mindset, which knows far more about trademarks than it does about beer. Bass pale ale is a beer with a fantastic heritage: it was, for more than a century, a hugely highly regarded brew, globally as well as in the UK (my grandfather told me that before the First World War, he and his pals would scour North London looking for pubs that sold draught Bass), so much so that it suffered more than anyone else from lesser brews being passed off as the red triangle beer. That was one reason why Bass was so keen to register its own trademark as speedily as possible.
Before we continue, here's a panegyric on Bass from a book published in 1884 called Fortunes Made In Business which will show you how much Bass was an icon:
Continue reading The Bass red triangle: things AB-InBev won't tell you →
AB InbevBassBass pale aleIndia Pale AleIPAstupid marketeers
Beer, Beer advertising
Budweiser 666: the drink of the beast
20th April 2010 Martyn Cornell	Leave a comment
Budweiser 666: It'll make you horny
Silly joke: but the fact that even someone with my limited Photoshop skills can knock up an unkind photospoof of AB Inbev's new "entry level" four per cent alcohol lager for the British market, Bud 66, in 15 minutes suggests the company's marketing department didn't think hard enough about the branding. And my apologies to Stuart MacFarlane, AB Inbev's UK president: his skin's not really that colour. (The horns, though …)
The most interesting fact about Bud 66 is not the mockable name, however, nor the fact that you and I, dear reader, won't like it (since the maker describes it as a "lightly carbonated lager" brewed with a "touch of sweetness for a smooth easy taste" and "targeted at the early 20s market", which translates as "fizzy, over-sugary and bland, and designed for people we think don't know anything about beer" – if I were in my early 20s I'd be extremely insulted that InBev thinks this is the sort of stuff I'd like to drink.)
Nor is it the way that the company attempts to present blatantly copying Beck's Vier and Stella Artois 4% as "another example of innovation by AB InBev". Rather, it's that InBev feels it has to enter this category with Bud at all, with MacFarlane describing the launch as InBev's "most important business action in 2010".
Continue reading Budweiser 666: the drink of the beast →
AB InbevBud 66BudweiserLagerLOBI


Seven people who wrote in candidates swung an election for state representative in Bemidji, Minn.
John Persell, a DFLer, won re-election by four votes in a rematch of a 2016 race in which GOP Rep. Matt Bliss beat Persell.
If only we could see the names of the write-in candidates.
It's worth noting, by the way, that the famous "Lizard Person" write-in vote in the Norm Coleman-Al Franken Senate election in 2008 came from Bemidji.


text:
North Porch, Left Portal (Incarnation Portal), Tympanum- Gifts of the Magi and Dream of the Magi c 1194-1230, from the Cathedral of Chartres, France. At left is the Adoration of the Magi (Matthew 2:1)..Two Magi (crowned) stand at left, holding jars. One has a beard and the other is clean-shaven. The third Magus (bearded) kneels, handing a round object to the Christ Child, who sits on Mary's lap in the middle of the composition. Above them is the star of Bethlehem between two angels holding...
North Porch, Left Portal (Incarnation Portal), Tympanum- Gifts of the Magi and Dream of the Magi c 1194-1230, from the Cathedral of Chartres, France. At left is the Adoration of the Magi (Matthew 2:1)..Two Magi (crowned) stand at left, holding jars. One has a beard and the other is clean-shaven. The third Magus (bearded) kneels, handing a round object to the Christ Child, who sits on Mary's lap in the middle of the composition. Above them is the star of Bethlehem between two angels holding scrolls..At right is the Dream of the Magi. (Matthew 2:12).Two of the Magi (bearded, still crowned) lie sleeping on a bed at the lower right. The third Magus (beardless) appears behind them, with his eyes closed and his head propped up in his hand. Above is an angel with a scroll, one of the pair of angels who flank the star of Bethlehem at the top of the tympanum..Surrounding the central scene is the Inner archivolt. It contains angels holding candlesticks standing on clouds. Below The Virgin Mary (veiled) lies on a bed that is parallel to the panel plane. She raises one hand. The Christ Child (in swaddling clothes) is in a manger above the bed. Above him are the heads of the ox and the ass. They are probably a reference to Old Testament verses thought to be prophecies of the coming of the Messiah. Isaiah 1:3 says, "The ox knows his owner and the ass his maker's crib." There is a similar verse in Habakkuk. The apocryphal Protevangelium of James mentions only the ass. The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew also says that an ox and an ass worshiped the Christ Child in the manger..Above are angels leaning out of a cloud and holding a long scroll.. A UNESCO World Heritage Site. .
Chatres, sculpture, cathedral, Notre Dame, gothic, Cathédrale de Chartres, Pictorial works, Church, decoration, ornament, architecture, Christian, art, symbolism--Medieval, narative, religious, Catholic, monumental, iconic, architectureal, historic, UNESCO World Heritage Site, art, artistic, stone, sculptures
PWP88466-262-Chartres-Cathedral-Gothic-sculpture.tif

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Jasia gives us a look at Christmas in Michigan with a Polish flair. I love the Santa she painted herself and I'm plotting how to steal that gorgeous tablecloth.
Christmases past and present have always been about family, handmade decorations, and warmth. Let me take you on a tour of my childhood Christmas, through the lean years as a young adult, up until the present. And what does a wicker chair have to do with Christmas anyway? A visit with Wendy will tug at your heart.
Thomas walks us through a wonderland of handmade decorations that is truly extraordinary. I swear I can smell the cinnamon and oranges from here. Then, he offers up some delicious refreshments to tantalize our tastebuds. And, from his latest Twitter updates I know he's still baking.
Thomas, how big is your guest room? With all these wonders to enjoy we may all be hanging around for a while.
Sheri gives us a personal look at her beautiful Christmas trees and the family ornaments that decorate them. Sheri, I remember those crinolines and yes, they were itchy. My favorite ornament is the beaded chandelier. It's not only gorgeous, it's handmade by her daughter.
Janet gives us her family's Christmas trees from past to present. It will spark memories for all of us as we remember our versions of trees and decorations. I especially loved the fireplace and yes, I do remember wooden orange crates.
Amy gives us a different perspective with her Christmas Oddities. We all have some quirky tradition or decoration that makes sense to only us, although Amy may have the world's record. I can relate to the hunting snowman - we're somewhat preoccupied with fish and fishing at my house.
Becky's decorations have been downsized to fit her small apartment, but still offer lots of "comfort and joy". Her angel tree-topper is both unique and beautiful. Is it stained glass?
Kathy gives us another look at Christmas past and present including a visit to a Christmas tree farm. Bundle up before you head over to Kathy's - it looks a bit cold in all that snow.
Bob offers a tour of his own as he is creating ornaments for each person in his ancestor chart going back to his great grandparents. He's got a slideshow providing a look at each ornament and separate posts on his blog to describe each one. This is still a work in progress and his blog will be updated as new ornaments are added. What a delightful idea!
Apple took the slideshow and kicked it up a notch with an animated look at Christmases past and present. It's a great expression of the joy of Christmas full of smiling faces and toe-tapping music. The geek in me has already checked out the SLIDE platform she uses to see how it can be put to use for other family projects. Thanks Apple!
Miriam gives a charming tour of her adorable cottage that her family is lovingly restoring. She also uses another version of the slide platform to showcase her tree ornaments along with an Advent calendar that has to bring back memories to all of us.
Jewelgirl brings back another Christmas memory - comparing our gifts with the rest of the kids in the neighborhood. Looks like she got all the cool toys! I love the tractor - and I'm quite jealous.
Elyse takes us to California to take a look at her early Christmas memories. The bear stocking is huge - was Santa ever able to fill it? It's a beautiful visit back in time and shows lots of fun and fancy.
Our tour winds up down here at Moultrie Creek where we have a slideshow presenting our view of Christmas, Florida style. It's an eclectic tour since I also include several treasures collected during our "honeymoon" tour of Germany (courtesy of the U.S. Army).
Participating genea-bloggers offer a tour of their family's Christmas decorations and traditions - past and present.


Many people love to modify their style of the flat into something special, something one of its kind, something which is not famous among other individuals. Several individuals choose different paints and several of them love wallpapers. Every of the methods is broadly known and common among interior design.
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Decide where you would like to have the photo wallpaper – the ornament is usually large and it ought to be considered which wall and room it should highlight. For instance, bright colors are needed to small spaces to make them larger and airy.
Decide which painting you would like to posses on your walls – it is the most difficult step of your task. Picking the most suitable wallpaper can be very challenging because it is not a image which can be removed from the wall. During selecting the image take into consideration your interests and absorption.
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Having graffiti on the wall is able to be a very fearless. Nonetheless, it is important to check all available images and choose the most appropriate one, which will stress the nature of your space and not damage it, changing into wreck.


Shareholders of world's number one miner BHP will decide next month whether the company should quit Australia's top mining lobby group, following a resolution submitted by a local ethical investing group.
The motions, put forward by the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR), argue that BHP should terminate paid annual membership in any industry groups whose views on climate change and energy policy conflict with the miner's own views.
The ACCR argues BHP's reputation will suffer from inconsistencies between the company and MCA in climate policy positions.
In particular, the document calls for the termination of membership fees to the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA), and for the disclosure of payments by BHP for direct or indirect lobbying relating to climate and energy policy.
According to the ACCR, BHP's reputation will suffer from inconsistencies between the company and MCA in policy positions on carbon pricing, adoption of the Finkel Review's recommendations, and new coal-fired power generation and fossil fuel subsidies.
While BHP has agreed to let investors vote on the issue, it recommended shareholders to decide against it as it said the resolution, as a whole, was not in the company's interests.
"We believe that by working within associations, we can, with other like-minded members, seek to exert a positive influence on the industry as a whole," BHP said in a statement.
"This does not mean, however, that we will always agree with every position or approach that every industry association to which we belong adopts on every issue."
BHP noted it plans to review all its memberships and spell out any big differences it has with industry associations on key issues by December 31.
Shareholders will vote on the ACCR's two resolutions at BHP's annual general meeting in London in October.


We are pleased to announce the availability of CA Business Intelligence JasperReports Server 6.2 (CABI 6.2) for CA Service Management - CA Service Desk Manager, CA Service Catalog, and CA Asset Portfolio Management. CABI 6.2 provides default reporting capabilities for the CA Service Management solution and is powered by TIBCO Jaspersoft technology.
With respect to this announcement, we would like you to take note of the following important information that will help your organization plan for the adoption of CABI 6.2 for CA Service Management.
CA Business Intelligence JasperReports Server 6.2 (CABI 6.2) installation media is currently available for download from the CA Service Management product download pages at CA Support Online. It can be installed with CA Service Desk Manager 14.1, CA Service Catalog 14.1 or CA Asset Portfolio Management 14.1, with the latest cumulative patch.
The installation media also contains out-of-the-box reports built on CABI 6.2 technology.
CA Business Intelligence 4.1 (SAP Business Objects) - the default reporting capability for CA Service Management solution prior to April 1, 2016 - will be supported until the earlier of December 31, 2018 or the End of Service of your associated CA product for customers who have implemented it in their environments.
Documentation for CABI 6.2 installation and administration with CA Service Management is available through the CA Service Management DocOps page here.
Access to TIBCO Jaspersoft online learning portal at no additional cost as well as new and updated CA Education courses are available to help your organization prepare for CABI 6.2 adoption. Please check the details here.
An FAQ section follows this announcement. We recommend that you review the FAQ and add your feedback and additional questions under the comments section of this blog.
We plan to conduct a community webcast covering this new capability and to answer questions relating to it.
Again, we are excited about releasing this new reporting capability to CA Service Management customers.
What is CA Business Intelligence JasperReports Server 6.2?
CA Business Intelligence JasperReports Server 6.2 (CABI 6.2) is the new default reporting technology included with the CA Service Management products as well as a number of other CA products. CABI 6.2 is built on industry leading TIBCO Jaspersoft technology that offers powerful, comprehensive yet easy to use business intelligence capabilities like Centralized Reporting, Dashboards, and Data Analytics supported by flexible, modern and embeddable server architecture, Ad Hoc Reports and Dashboards development, OLAP Analysis etc. to name a few.
Why is the CA Service Management solution moving to Jaspersoft as its default reporting technology?
Beginning April 1, 2016, CA stopped distributing CA Business Intelligence 4.1 (CABI 4.1; with SAP Business Objects) in any of its products globally. CA Service Management customers have been asking for an embedded reporting technology with a light footprint, ease-of-use and administration, drag-and-drop self-service business intelligence, ad hoc analysis, etc. TIBCO Jaspersoft-based CABI 6.2 meets those needs.
What's the End-of-Service date for CABI 4.1 (with SAP Business Objects)?
For customers who obtained CABI 4.1 along with CA Service Management, CABI 4.1 will continue to be supported until December 31, 2018 or until the End-of-Service for CA Service Management 14.1 products, whichever is earlier. The End-of-Service date for CA Service Management 14.1 products is not announced yet.
We have an enterprise license for SAP Business Objects. Can we continue using CABI 4.1 content included with the CA Service Management products?
Yes. CABI 4.1 content is available on product installation media for CA Service Desk Manager, CA Service Catalog and CA Asset Portfolio Management, and can be used with custom implementations of SAP Business Objects. However, CA will provide support for CABI 4.1 out-of-the-box content ONLY in these cases.
What versions of CA Service Management products support CABI 6.2?
CABI 6.2 is supported with CA Service Management 14.1 products with the latest cumulative patch i.e. CA SDM 14.1.03, CA Service Catalog 14.1.02, and CA Asset Portfolio Management 14.1.02.
What out-of-the-box reports are included with CABI 6.2?
This release includes limited but some very valuable out-of-the-box reports for CA SDM, CA Service Catalog and CA Asset Portfolio Management. These reports were selected for inclusion through a survey late last year where a number of customers indicated their top preferences for default content. Please be aware of this as you plan your migration. We also encourage community members to submit report content ideas that would benefit the broader community. Such ideas, if voted well by the community members, will be considered for inclusion in out-of-the-box content set in the future.
Are there any things that can help convert reports from CABI 4.1 to CABI 6.2?
Though End-of-Service for CABI 4.1 is considerably far off in time, it is prudent to begin content migration planning from CABI 4.1 to CABI 6.2 early. Although there is no automated mechanism to migrate the report content, CABI 6.2 tools are easy to use and proper planning can expedite content migration.
Jaspersoft Studio is the report designer tool for JasperReports and JasperReports Server. Report developers can use Jaspersoft Studio to create sophisticated report layouts containing charts, sub reports, images, crosstabs, and more. Advanced and first-time report developers can easily adapt to the report design environment that is powerful and intuitive. Jaspersoft Studio is available as an Eclipse plug-in so developers who use Eclipse as their primary development tool can benefit from the capabilities of the Eclipse platform while developing reports.
Jaspersoft Studio offers useful capabilities for efficient report creation and maintenance. Features such as improved pixel precision and inheritance facilitate developers in quickly designing high quality reports.
Jaspersoft Studio can be downloaded from the TIBCO Jaspersoft web site, and the license included with CABI 6.2 for CA Service Management can be applied on Jaspersoft Studio.
We are putting together a CA Education course focused on transitioning CABI 4.1 reports to CABI 6.2 to help with migration planning.
We also encourage community members to submit report content ideas that would benefit the broader community. Such ideas, if voted well by the community members, will be considered for inclusion in out-of-the-box content set in the future.
Does CABI 6.2 offer adhoc reporting capability? What is the equivalent of CABI 4.1 (Business Objects) 'Universe' in CABI 6.2?
Jaspersoft delivers a very powerful ad hoc analysis and self-service business intelligence capability enabled by Jaspersoft Domains and Drag-n-Drop visualization. Jaspersoft Domains (like Universes) can be accessed and modified via a browser. The report designer tool also offers a powerful expression editor incorporating several built-in functions and the ability to create new ones.
Currently CABI 6.2 for CA Service Management does not include out-of-the-box domains. However, creation of domains in Jaspersoft is very easy - though it does require architectural considerations and planning around data structures and joins.
How would the Offline Reporting capability work with CABI 6.2 with CA Service Desk Manager?
Offline reporting procedures will work in a similar fashion in CABI 6.2 to that of CABI 4.1. The Offline Reporting procedure supported within the CA Service Management solution leverages the Transactional Replication capability offered by the Microsoft SQL Server database. CABI 6.2 is then configured with the replicated instance of the database. For reporting off of CA Service Desk Manager replicated data a service desk instance is required in the replicated environment. Please visit the Offline Reporting topic under CA Service Management documentation Wiki for more details.
Where do I find education materials for CABI 6.2?
Details of CA Education courses as well as access to TIBCO Jaspersoft online learning portal is available through CA Service Management DocOps space.
Have a question that is not answered?
Please add your question to the comment section of this blog. We will review your question and answer your question at the earliest possible opportunity.
Thanks for sharing this with the community Rajeev!
We currently have CABI 4.1 SP5 with a conventional SD 14.1.2 primary server as the datasource for offline reporting. Can the same primary server be the data source for both CABI 4.1 and CABI 6.2? We are looking to avoid having another copy of the mdb database replicated.
Sorry for the delay in response to your questions here - I just noticed them on this post. I will try to answer each one for you. For this first one, Yes, you can run CABI 4.1 and CABI 6.2 against the same offline reporting instance of SDM, however, Jasper requires CP3 for 14.1 - so you will have to be on 14.1.3 to use CABI 6.2.
Is there a sizing guide and HA architecture guide available? We have a CABI 4.1 SP5 Distributed High Availability consisting of 6 servers and would want to replicate the capacity and redundancy.
The first link is referencing Jasper 5.5, so I am not sure if it would apply, but what you could do is join the Japsper community site there and post the question for 6.2 and see if anyone comes back with something of value there.
Sorry - forgot about the sizing guide... we dont have one at the moment, however, our CABI COE team is currently working on some scalability testing and will be completing a sizing chart as part of the project. The sizing will be published in the near future (dont have an exact ETA just yet).
Do the pdm (PdmToday, PdmDowntime, etc...) functions still work in CABI 6.2 ?
If so, where do we add them ?
If not, can we use CABI 6.2 to access the SDM database directly (if we create views that could replace the values usually returned by the pdm functions) ?
Yes. PDM functions still work. Typically you would use them in the Query. Below is a snippet from a query that comes in from one of the OOTB reports.
Link in paragraph 6. Documentation for CABI 6.2 installation... links to a not-found document.
jeffery.mason The link is fixed now. Thanks for pointing it out.
You may find the "Important!!" note in the release notes of CA Service Desk Manager 14.1 clarifying.
That note is under the "CA Common Components" section and a direct link to the page is: https://docops.ca.com/ca-service-management/14-1/en/release-information/supportability-matrix#SupportabilityMatrix-CACommonComponents .
Important! Customers purchasing CA Service Management products on or after April 1, 2016 are only eligible to use CABI JasperReports® Server r6.2.0. We will continue to support CABI 4.x for customers who purchased CA Service Management, CA IT Asset Manager, or CA Service Catalog products prior to April 1, 2016.
"We are putting together a CA Education course focused on transitioning CABI 4.1 reports to CABI 6.2 to help with migration planning. "
Can you share with me that Education Course?
Re: We are putting together a CA Education course focused on transitioning CABI 4.1 reports to CABI 6.2 to help with migration planning.
Could you please share the CA Education course name?
When I clicked on the Education course materials, I received an error "Http Error 404 Page Not Found"
Is there any document that explains about how to modify the existing custom report ? I would like to see the custom report deployed and needs to make changes in Jasper. I would a document to proceed with it.


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Flower of Evil Episode 4 RAW
Flower of Evil Episode 4 Short Summary
Full Summary coming soon here.
Evil Flower' Moon Chae-won found Lee Jun-ki's watch at a crime scene... 'Shock ending'
In the tvN drama'The Flower of Evil', Moon Chae-won's faith toward her husband, Lee Jun-ki, began to crack.
The 4th episode of tvN's Wednesday and Thursday drama'Evil Flower' (Director Chul-gyu Kim/playplay Yoo Jeong-hee/ Production Studio Dragon, Monster Union) broadcasted on the 6th (Thursday) was an average of 3.7% for households and 4.1% on a paid platform that integrates cable, IPTV, and satellite. The TVN's target audience ratings of men and women were also the highest with an average of 2.4% and a maximum of 2.6% (provided by Nielsen Korea).
In the broadcast that day, Chae-won (Moon Chae-won) witnessed that the evidence found at the crime scene was her husband's watch, and decorated the 4th ending with confusion and excited even viewers.
First, Do Hyun-soo (Lee Jun-ki)'s older sister, Do Hae-soo (Jang Hee-jin) first appeared and drew attention. Chaewon went to meet him in person to dig into Do Hyun-su, who had no information left, but the only answer he returned was that he had never seen "Our Hyun-su" in 18 years. However, in those words, Chae-won felt a strange feeling of sadness, not resentment toward his younger brother, and left doubts about her.
Afterwards, Chae Won received a report that there was a recent photo of Do Hyun-soo, a suspect in the'Murder of Nam Soon-gil (played by Lee Gyu-bok). Baek Hee-sung (Lee Jun-ki) and Kim Moo-jin (Seo Hyun-woo), who shared their weaknesses and cooperated with each other, noticed this and made a plan to arrive before the police and take photos.
At this time, Chae-won, who was heading to the home of the informant, recalled the'Serial Murder Case of Yeonju 18 years ago' linked to this case, and even doubted whether the autograph of Jin Beom Do Min-seok (played by Choi Byung-mo) would be suicide, and his son Do Hyun-soo's possible accomplice. Revealed. The appearance of Chaewon approaching the case without knowing that her husband, Baek Hee-sung's true identity is Do Hyun-soo, made the hearts of viewers feel chewy.
The photos of Do Hyun-soo's recent appearance came into the hands of Park Gyeong-chun (played by Yoon Byung-hee), the real culprit of the ``Nam Soon-gil murder case,'' who eavesdropped into the police station and stole information, not by the police or Baek Hee-seong. He was the husband of Jung Mi-sook, a victim who could not find the body of the seven victims Do Min-seok killed. Knowing that his wife's golden carp cell phone ring belonged to Do Hyun-soo, he was convinced that he was Do Min-seok's accomplice and lured him to himself.
Baek Hee-seong, who needs to get a picture from Park Gyeong-chun, stopped working at the voice of Chae-won, who shouted "Do Hyun-soo?!" The breathtaking tension of the two focused on each other made even viewers hold their breath.
Then, the chase of Baek Hee-sung who ran desperately and chasing him began. Baek Hee-seong, hiding in a dark warehouse, protected her by blocking tools that were about to fall to Charge-won. Baek Hee-seong escaped from the clash of ironic actions, binding Chae-won with handcuffs.
At the end of the broadcast, Chaewon was shocked when he saw a wristwatch, an evidence from the warehouse. It was not only the same as her husband, Baek Hee-seong, but also the initials'HSBaek' engraved on the line, just like the one he gave as a birthday present. Chaewon's expression, which left only confusion with the blood disappeared, decorated a strong ending, raising the expectation of what kind of storm will rush in the future.
Viewers also said, "This drama is really unpredictable", "My heart was nervous for the whole hour", "If I quit here, how do I wait until next week?", "I was quick to see it again", "The excitement does not subside", " The deployment was fast and the tension was crazy." He showed off his firepower by pouring out various reactions.
In this way, the man Baek Hee-sung, who even played love, and his wife Chae-won, who began to doubt his reality, and two people facing each other in front of the truth they want to ignore, the tvN drama'Flower of Evil', which is immersed in viewers with a high-density emotional chase, is held every Wednesday, It airs at 10:50 on Thursday night.
Posted by Danialrose at 8:12 AM
Labels: Flower of Evil Episode 4 RAW
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« Cameron Carpenter: Rock'n'Roll By The Numbers – 8 Good Reasons
Roxanne Tellier – And a Happy New Year! »
JAIMIE VERNON – LAMENT FOR THE DJ
Following 11 years as the sole live-to-air freestyle radio program on Canadian terrestrial radio, 'Marsden Theatre' aired its last show on 94.9 The Rock in Oshawa, Ontario this past weekend.
'Marsden Theatre' was a two-day-a-week culmination of playlists and psychotropic banter made fun and participatory by the always irreverent (and occasionally annoying) David Marsden.
David is one of three Canadian DJs in the Disc Jockey Hall of Fame [the others are Red Robinson and Jay Nelson]. The crux of the show is a blend of late '70s and full-on 1980s pre-ironic Alternative Music as Marsden used to pitch on legendary CFNY-FM (a station that now, post-ironically, plays Hipster music).
(Marsden (L) with Klaatu's Dee Long)
Marsden also has his finger on the pulse of new alternative independent music. Only in a freeform music format could you hear solo music by members of Klaatu and ME on a prime-time Saturday evening time slot! Yes, David's been spinning a track of mine since 2006 called "Rest In Peace". And before you think this is the inspiration for my rant, it's not. My song wasn't making or breaking the listenership of his shows.
The station didn't pull Marsden's showcase because of low ratings. The die-hard listener ship has continued to grow as the Greater Toronto Area radio landscape continues to narrow and become ubiquitous. No, they pulled it because they're revamping the format of the station as per the myopic trend- in-a-box consultants who decide such things. Earlier this year Q107 in Toronto ditched its 14 year run as the premiere Classic Rock station to become what they were in the '80s – Toronto's Rock. This meant doing nothing except expanding their definition of Rock by adding '90s grunge and peppering the playlist with modern tracks by the likes of The Black Keys, The Trews, Monster Truck, The Sheepdogs and Big Wreck. If you want Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild" or Creedence Clearwater's "Willie & The Poorboys" then you'll have to dial into their long-running 12 hour Psychedelic Psundays show each week with Andy Frost.
Despite the ballyhoo from irate long-time listeners – which Q107 has gleefully mocked on air by running telephone messages of the haters as part of their rebranding efforts – the station is thriving. It was a major franchise risk (other stations in the chain have done the same in several major Canadian cities).
To that end, 94.9 The Rock has been feeling the pinch and the drain of listeners from their little-station-that-could which broadcasts from an airport tower in Oshawa. Marsden's show was the first casualty. But what of the format shift? Q107 was reacting to the solid fan base of Hamilton's Y108 – also a rock station and St. Catharines' HTZ-FM which is a heavier rock station. If 94.9 The Rock follows suit we will have four stations playing various degrees of the same formulaic rock to a population base exceeding 4 or 5 million people. To the victor go the spoils.
So Toronto will soon have a competing Rock market in one corner and a competing R & B/Rap/Pop/WTF market in the other with one lone station, BOOM 97.3, playing 1980s chart-toppers – some of which occasionally found a home on Marsden's old CFNY playlists (like Pete Shelley's "Homosapien"). But that's not their entire mode of operations. BOOM prides itself as the 'Best of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s' which means you will hear Nena's "99 Red Balloons" squashed between Bon Jovi's "Bad Medicine" and Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild" (apparently BOOM's music director thinks a song from 1968 qualifies as a 1970s staple). In the heyday of terrestrial radio a playlist like this would have been standard fair if we were talking about a fast-breaking Top40 format. But it's not Top40 radio. It's jukebox oldies radio. And the jukebox is repetitively dull. NOTE: To their credit they had a campaign where guest artists performed hit songs in the station's elevator. Very clever and effective.
In Marsden's world he would have spun the 12" German language dance mix of "99 Luftballons". He would have played the Kim Wilde version of "Born To Be Wild" and he would have made lewd comments about Bon Jovi's tight trousers. Instead, BOOM trots out these non-sequitorial playlists with a skip and a hop and bright-shiny smiles and soccer Moms and daycare workers and bank tellers rejoice. It's where music has gone to die on an endless digital loop.
And this is the sad state of terrestrial radio right now. I thought it was bad 5 years ago and now I realize that they've sunk the ship even further. I will now hazard a guess that there's probably a point in which it will get so bad that they'll be bribing listeners to come on board and not just with cash prize contests and 5-day/4-night trips to The Guantanamo Bay Beach Resort. I expect there will be branding stings between songs saying "Please, please, please don't change the channel. We'll wash your car. We'll take your kids to school. We'll service your husband." Newcap's recent stunt this year to only play portions of songs was met with universal scorn. Don't piss off the audience. Or the artists. Here's another one that not only failed, but was racist as well:
The rallying cry for a few years from the disenfranchised is that we should mosey on over to Satellite radio.
Sorry, kids. The peanut-farming, bean-counting consultants are way ahead of you and driven that outlet into the ground as well. 215 channels of narrow-casting sameness. They've got an Elvis Channel, a Beatles Channel, a Dylan Channel, and a Grateful Dead Channel among other formats. Which is great for die-hards but why, when I switch to their 1950s Channel, am I still hearing the exact same Elvis tunes? Or hearing Dylan on the Folk Channel, the 1960s Channel, the Americana Channel and the 1970s Channel? They had a universe to build from the ground up and in less than a decade they've moved the failings of terrestrial radio over to Sirius XM. Don't believe me? Look here:
What radio doesn't seem to grasp (or any corporation as its endemic to all corporate mentality) is that David Marsden is the brand. He will out-live the radio fads, the stations and the people who are programming them. He always does. He started on terrestrial in the 1960s and became a pioneer for rock radio under the name Dave Mickie at a modest little station called CFCO in Chatham, Ontario in 1963. That's 51 years. He created his own radio format – one that stations no longer recognize…including CHUM, whom he once worked for, and CFNY…a station he helped build. He has taken his audience with him. You'd think that a smart radio programmer would realize this. He's the house band. He's the reason people are tuning in.
There's a reason everyone loved Alan Freed, John Peel, Murray The K, Wolfman Jack, Jungle Jay Nelson, Casey Kasem and Bob 'The Iceman' Segarini. They were the conduit to all the great music. Like the cool uncle that snuck you that first beer when you were under age or let you smoke pot at the family BBQ when no one was looking. They were the direct line to the cool, to the hip, to the awesome music that your parents either hated or didn't understand. Generals in the rebellion against conformity and sheepishness. Radio has killed all the generals and it's now being run by the guys on KP duty who missed the helicopter evacuation when the North Vietnamese over-ran Saigon in 1975.
The only salvation, it seems, is internet radio and finding the internet stations that are mixing it up, that are driving music formats to the edge of sanity and back. Marsden's been there for awhile now. He's been running simultaneously on both 94.9 The Rock and online. Now he's put down anchor permanently on the web. Long live the King of Freeform Radio: http://www.marsdenglobal.com/
THIS WEEK'S VIRAL FIND:
THIS WEEK'S VIRAL OLDIE:
Send your CDs for review to this NEW address: Jaimie Vernon, 4003 Ellesmere Road, Toronto, ON M1C 1J3 CANADA
=JV=
Jaimie's column appears every Saturday
Jaimie "Captain CanCon" Vernon has been president of the on again/off-again Bullseye Records of Canada since 1985. He wrote and published Great White Noise magazine in the '90s, has been a musician for 33 years, and recently discovered he's been happily married for 16 years. He is also the author of the recently released Canadian Pop Music Encyclopedia and a collection of his most popular 'Don't Believe A Word I Say' columns called 'Life's A Canadian…BLOG' is now available at Amazon.com
This entry was posted on December 20, 2014 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Opinion with tags 99 Luftballons, Alan Freed, Bob Segarini, Bon Jovi, BOOM 97.3, Born To Be Wild, Canadian Music, Canadian radio, Casey Kasem, CFNY, David Marsden, DBAWIS, disc jockey, DJ, Don't Believe a Word I Say, internet radio, Jaimie Vernon, Jay Nelson, Mars Bar, Marsden Theatre, Murray The K, Q107, Red Balloons, Satellite Radio, Sirius XM, terrestrial radio, The Rock 94.9, Toronto's Rock, Wolfman Jack, Y108.	You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2 Responses to "JAIMIE VERNON – LAMENT FOR THE DJ"
I'd take Craig Venn and Lucky over Marsden any day. The 70's are over. It's time to move along.
David Marsden Says:
Thank you Jamie!!! Not sure where Mikey gets the 70's reference from. Alas – that's why there are different offerings. 🙂
Leave a Reply to David Marsden Cancel reply


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Tria Image
PulseView
Dulcian
SeDDaRA
GCLAD
Welcome to Quarktet Technologies!
Tria, version 3.10.80 (32-bit) and 3.1.80 (64-bit), is now available at for $320 (US). In addition to our award-winning blind deconvolution, Tria has fast image registration, a good selection of de-noising filters, image analysis tools that cannot be found anywhere else, and image viewers designed for image analyzers. For Version 3.1, we have added new functions, object counting, better memory management, and a quick stats pop-up window.
Quarktet is also proud to announce our latest release of PulseView, version 1.4, available for only $24 (US). We received such positive feedback from Tria's graphs, that we created a 'spin-off'. PulseView pulls in text files and converts them to graphs, histograms, FFTs, and audio sound. It is a simple idea that will save you a lot of time if you spend a lot of time graphing data files with spreadsheets or scripting programs. See the PulseView page for more information.
We are taking orders for 'GCLAD-IN-A-BOX', our low-cost, high sensitivity laser ultrasound detection system. This system can be used for laboratory research, industrial proof-of-concept, or even customized to fit your application. Our latest Dulcian detector (not pictured) has a remote optical housing for easier alignment and installation. More information is available here. Turn-around time is about 6-8 weeks. We have some recent interest in the use of this technology for sensing acoustic in liquids. Please ask!
Thank you for visiting out site!
Latest News: Tria Version 3.1.80 (32-bit and 64-bit versions) has been released and is available for download! This version adds additional lineout options and a 1D FFT. See features for a list of all the great stuff in Tria Image processing.
Just for fun, here is our first attempt at applyng deconvolution to an image of a Black Hole (actually the event horizon).
New Research for Laser-based Ultrasound. "Focused ultrasound sensing in water using a GCLAD system". Dr. Caron is lead author. See Research.
New to Quarktet? This is a short description of our terms:
Laser Ultrasound--A class of techniques that generate or detect ultrasonic waves in materials using various laser-based techniques.
CLGU--Continuous Laser Generation of Ultrasound. This is a new method of generating ultrasound in materials using a high-powered continuous-wave laser.
GCLAD--Gas-coupled Laser Acoustic Detection. A method of detecting ultrasound where a laser's path is altered by the wave passing though the beam.
Dulcian--Our custom photodetector made specifically for GCLAD systems.
Blind Deconvolution--A class of methods that identify the blur in an image and attempt to remove the blur to restore the image.
SeDDaRA--A blind deconvolution method that identifies the blur in an image through comparison with a similar, but un-blurred image.
Tria--Our image processing progam that allows for easy application of SeDDaRA and host of other uncommon image processing methods.
PulseView--A data plotting program that quickly converts text-based data into a graph.
About Quarktet
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Born and raised in the backstreets of Paris the artist now known as Axel Loughrey picked up his first guitar at the tender age of 8, completed his first songs at 14 and hasn't looked back since. He eventually packed up his guitar with a head full of songs and ventured across the North Sea to arrive on these shores and try his luck in the demanding world of the UK music scene. Championed by the likes of Ms Jo Whiley and interviews and live material aired on Channel 4 Music, Axel Loughrey has certainly raised the eyebrows of music royalty in more ways then one. From being the main man in the now defunct Ruby Red Lips to taking on the heavy traffic of the UK music scene head on with his own solo material, this has proved to be the right decision as he was picked from a staggering 70000 applicants to grace the stage at Orange Unsigned. With a voice and music style as velvet as Lou Reed's Underground, Axel certainly has the style, the look, and most importantly the songs ready to deliver to the wider audience. With two self released EP's already in his kit bag, the beautiful 'Small Town, Small People' and the invoking 'Galloway Hill' Axel is already taking the acclaim and plaudits on the live scene and is now ready to step forth with his third and highly anticipated release a darker side of the blues which makes the 'Love Thing' EP. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQZFOuGax1E With a myriad of high profile gigs and festival appearances already secured, and a wide range of music industry gurus biting at the bit, Axel could soon well be the next 21st century boy!!


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Keyboard 1 & 2 – Learn To Read Music And Play Your Favorites! Learning Materials May Need To Be Purchased. Keyboards Are Provided In Class, And Are Also Available For Rent ($19/Mo) Or Purchase For Home Practice (Supplies Limited).
Guitar 1 – Learn The Basics, Chord Structure, Strumming Skills, Scales, And More. Approx. $10-$50 Of Learning Materials Will Need To Be Purchased. Guitars Required, And Are Available For Rent ($19/Mo) Or Purchase (Supplies Limited).
Ukulele 1– Learn The Basics, Chord Structure, Strumming Skills, Scales, And More. Approx. $10-$20 of Learning Materials Ukuleles are required and are Available to Be Purchased. Required, And Are Available For Purchase.
Violin 1 – Learn technique and more! Vibe also offers Private Violin lessons.
Drums – Learn Technique, Basic Reading, Rudiments And More. Learning Materials May Need To Be Purchased. Class Materials Cost Approx. $30 And Include Drum Pad And Sticks.