April 2009

Things have been a trifle quiet here for the last week. The cause is the usual one – things have been very busy away from the keyboard. The more that’s going on in the real world, the less time I’ve got for blogging here and writing imprecations against our lords and masters.

So here’s a roundup of latest activites:

• Reading Beer Festival has taken delivery of several of our beers including the final barrel of St Cuthman’s Red Wheelbarrow. We will be brewing this again in the near future.
• Threshers at Steyning has more or less sold out of it’s first order; they have ordered again and we hope they will be restocked in time for the bank holiday.
• Ropetackle Golden Ale is now ready to drink. I had a glass on Tuesday and it’s developed a pleasant refreshing flavour. Samples are going out to our outlets this and next week.
• We will be at Steyning Farmers Market this weekend with the last supplies of St Cuthman’s Red Wheelbarrow and Ropetackle Golden Ale.
• Pigs wearing sombreros and carrying packets of Lemsip and tissues have been spotted in our rural district. The brewery has ordered supplies of oinkment in case anyone comes down with symptoms.

{ 0 comments }

A friend of mine emailed me today reminding me that parts of the website are beginning to look rather out of date and there wasn’t enough about our beer.

He’s quite right on the first point of course, the website is well overdue for a spring clean. In our defense, I said that there are three big projects going on as well as a little one; they’ve all been taking a lot of time and what little is left has been devoted to making, bottling, labeling, and of course selling.

Coincidentally, one of the three big projects has come to fruition today with our return to Threshers. at the moment our beer is just in the Steyning store but I hope we may see it in several others in the near future.

It’s taken roughly four months to arrange this and has involved what’s seemed like an endless stream of emails, phone calls, meetings, more phone calls and emails, and so on. It’s been one of those peculiar situations where despite the fact that everyone wanted to get our beers into Threshers, it simply couldn’t be done until a complex set of procedures and conditions had been met. Thanks to sterling efforts by the staff of the Threshers Steyning branch, Threshers head office, and SIBA DDS, this has finally been done. I delivered the first order myself, early this evening.

…its also true that there’s been more about politics than about our beer here recently. I can’t promise that will change in the very near future. The reason of course is that the place where politics and the economy meet has become a very scary place recently. Startups suffer in these conditions more than well established companies and so it’s holding my attention.

{ 1 comment }

Well it went pretty much as expected didn’t it. Beer duty up another 2% of course and the inevitable increases in fuel and tobacco. There’s also an anti-success tax which will raise hardly anything but make anyone earning over 150k a year start looking for ways out of the UK. I can see a lot of business moving off to France. Public spending still growing – at a supposedly lower rate.

As far as I’m concerned the only real matter of interest was the public borrowing requirement which is now supposed to be around £348 billion over the next two years and a several hundred billion after that. To get a glimpse of how much that actually is you can read this.

Unfortunately, the Badger is being economical with the horror. He’s based his borrowing requirements on a forecast that the economy will grow by about 0.4% in 2010 and an astonishing 3.5% in 2011. We haven’t seen 3.5% growth since the heady days of the dot com era. It’s not going to happen again. The IMF believes the economy will actually shrink by 4.1% this year and contract another 0.4% next year and no respectable forecaster is prepared to look as far as 2011.

So borrowing will probably have to be much higher. If borrowing is higher, taxes will be higher too (all that interest to pay).

I think the best thing to do would be to shut down parliament now and see if the rest of us can’t get on without them. After all it works for Belgium.

{ 0 comments }

…that on reflection and a bit of discussion with the wife (who thought it was very funny but a bit too much) I didn’t publish. So here’s a nice dance instead.

{ 0 comments }

Summer is on its way.

Update – some people report difficulty in viewing the image. if it’s still not visible, please let me know.

{ 0 comments }

The banning of this advert on the basis of three complaints, has been so widely reported that I couldn’t think of anything further to add. It is of course, nannying at its most extreme and has the added annoyance of shutting down an attempt to revive a historic slogan. The ASA’s action has broken another small and fragile link with the past.

It was only when I realized that the basis of the ban was that the advert:

was likely to be understood by consumers to carry the clear implication that the beer would give the man enough confidence to tell the woman that the dress was unflattering

that I began to wonder. Has no one at the ASA seen this ?

..which was widely screened by the ‘Know Your Limits’ campaign from the NHS. The clear implication is that alcohol has made the man confident. In this case, confident of his ability to do backflips on wibbly wobbly scaffolding.

They can’t both be right can they ?

Since one of them is clearly wrong, and we live in straitened times, I’m going to suggest that one of these two groups be shut down. The envelope please……

…and the winner is the ‘Know Your Limits’ campaign. Although the ASA are idiots and ought to take common sense into account, Know your Limits is wildly expensive, and they are the minds behind the alcohol units campaign, which is in turn based on the flimsiest of evidence.

{ 0 comments }

Slump to end this year.

I can’t imagine why we should believe him. First of all he was talking about it ending by the middle of this year only last November. Secondly, it’s obviously in the government’s interest to try and talk up a moribund economy. Thirdly, if you take the notion that it’s a global recession seriously – and lord knows the mantra ‘it started in America’ has been repeated often enough – this chart from Alice Cook suggests no particular end in sight.

…it’s a chart of the US balance of payments. The more they spend, the richer everyone else got. Until last year that is when they suddenly stopped…

Update – apparently the IMF agrees with me that the Badger is at best being unrealistic.

Sigh. I wrote a blog post about the government this morning that was so rude, that on reflection I didn’t publish it.

{ 0 comments }

Just because someone drinks wine rather than beer, that doesn’t make them a twit. I have good friends who drink almost nothing else, and of course I’m happy for them to do so because it leaves more beer for me.

Believing that the taste of wine changes with the position of the planets, moon, and stars, does make a wine drinker a twit however. It’s also unlucky to be superstitious about wine since it’s unlucky to be gullible and credulous.

Via BoingBoing.

{ 0 comments }

I’ve been away from my desk all day so I’m late on commenting on this story in the Grauniad containing:

The publication of all MPs’ receipts is a time bomb waiting to explode in July. Government whips speak of the danger of byelections, and even suicides, when they are made public.

Hmm.

No, just checked. My sympathy meter didn’t twitch.

Hat tip to bloggers too numerous to mention.

{ 0 comments }