Spotted this on the way home from delivering beer to the Sussex Beer Festival this evening. We’ve got Black William, Merry Andrew, Velocity, and Ropetackle there.

Guess it proves the pen(cil) really is mightier than the sword.

We’ve been planning a new beer for some time, but the snow at the beginning of January – followed by the requirement to rapidly replace some of our inventory – have delayed things until last week. This last Thursday, I fnally got our act together and the first batch of Hoptoken, or possibly Hop Token, is now fermenting. It’s filled the brewery with the scent of orange blossom.

Most of our beers get most of their flavours from the malt and to a lesser extent, the yeast that we use. It’s not that hops are an afterthought, but they’ve played a less important part in my recipes. This is partly down to personal taste and partly down to a historical accident.

The taste aspect down to the peripatetic nature of my career which saw me spending 5 years in Munich in my younger days, and developing a taste for Munich’s local brew – Hefeweisen Wiessbier. This is a cloudy wheatbeer notable for it’s low hopping rate. You’d hardly know that it was hopped at all. My taste in beer has been skewed towards the lower end of the bitterness scale ever since, although since returning to the UK 5 years ago I’ve gradually come to enjoy bitterer brews and even the occasional IPA.

The historical accident was that we started the brewery in the middle of a hop shortage. In fact for the first 6 months it looked like we would be making beers without hops at all. I pretty much had to beg for our first few kilos and I still get a little frisson fear whenever I talk to a hop merchant (suppose they’ve run out ?). So the first recipes I put together had relatively small amounts of hops. They also tended to use continental hops since these were the only ones I could get hold of.

Hoptoken is different. We’ve been long aware of the gap in our lineup, and the discussion on whether or not to do an IPA or something similar has been going on for months. I asked around a number of our customers and in the end we’ve settled on around 4%, blondish, and about 40 IBUs (about grapefruit levels of bitterness). This is not too extreme but it’s certainly noticeable as it will activate the bitterness sensors at the back of your throat and even in the roof of your mouth.

We had some trouble deciding what to call it. In fact, virtually every hop related name and pun has already been taken and there’s no doubt that the name we’ve finally come up with: Hoptoken, is an obscure bit of history. These were tokens given to hop pickers in Sussex and Kent when the pickers took a measured amount of hops up to the oast houses. At the end of the day (or week) the hop tokens could be exchanged for real currency and so they were marked sixpence, 1 shilling and so on, as well as the name of the hop garden. There are people out there who collect them (inevitably) and we are looking at getting something like a hop token made up for us.

So what hops are we using ? This first example revolves around Amarillo hop from North America, but it looks as if the basic recipe will work with other varieties as well. We intend to produce a few variations such as Spalter and Willamette. Obviously these will taste different so it will be an opportunity to see what impact a particular variety of hop will have on a brew.

Hoptoken Amarillo is fermenting nicely and I expect it will be available casked and bottled within the next few weeks.

This Saturday between 9am and 1pm. Hope to see you there.

News on our new beer(s) later on today I hope.

Home this evening to discover the Health and Safety Executive have sent me a piece of knotted string ! Apparently I can order up to five more pieces of knotted string. For free. If you ignore the cost of what must be around a few quid per knot extorted from taxpayers once postage and labour (yes, it appears to be hand knotted) are taken into account.

This is to ‘help me keep the promise’ although the actual promise is not specified. How about this. I promise to send the HSE a letter under the FOI demanding they reveal how much money has been wasted on this pointless exercise. I might further promise to try an get the brains behind this particular ‘idea’ named and held up as a laughing stock throughout England.

It would seem that no one in the public sector seems to have grasped the situation. We are collectively – skint. Skint means that daft campaigns showering bits of knotted string on an unsuspecting population are more than risible, they are actively unwelcome.

Q4, 2009 was just revised up to an astounding 0.3% for the period covering Christmas.

….actually quite good news. It’s not brilliant but at least it was revised up from 0.1%. I wonder what news Q1, 2010 will bring. With all the snow quite a lot of production was lost.

Nevermind. I’ve just ordered the ingredients for our new beer. We’ll be brewing it next Thursday.

With the recent stories in the press including today’s revelation, it’s interesting to reflect why the poll figures for the Conservatives are still very low and appear not to have shifted with the allegations.

I think the reason is, that it’s not a surprise at all. Bullying is the way I’d describe the way the state treats everyone else, from draconian smoking bans, oppressive security apparatus, illegal wars, patients treated badly in hospitals while the institution is awarded foundation status, endless taxes, etc. etc. etc. What would be astonishing is if it turned out that the working environment within the state was all sweetness and light.

As it is, I’m surprised that stories like this are not more common.

Um. What he said…..

We bank with HSBC, so I was interested to see this story in the BBC this morning about the Chief Executives annual pay rise. Apparently it isn’t happening because the shareholders didn’t like it. Fair enough you might think, the shareholders are the owners and they are supposed to pay attention to things like salaries.

The really interesting part of the story is buried further down, the BBC comments:

However some argue that while HSBC did not directly benefit from the rescue of the banking sector, it still benefited from the general stabilisation of the financial system by the UK government’s intervention.

…and then without batting a BBC eyelid:

Earlier this year Mr Geoghegan said he was relocating to Hong Kong.

…because of the great economic environment here no doubt. HSBC says that it currently has no plans to move it’s head office or tax domicile. So the chief executive will hang out in one place and head office will be halfway round the planet in a different time zone. I wonder how long that arrangement will last.

After a day spent calculating January’s duty I’ve come home to discover the new series of Dr Who will be starting on April the Third. New trailer here. H/T to Appalling Strangeness for the update. He’s definitely not human, look at the size of that cranium!

On a less happy note I can recommend this as a fascinating read – in the sense that watching a horrifying car crash is fascinating.

H/T Guy Fawkes.

Yesterday the Telegraph quietly reported that the Conservatives are planning the ‘biggest PAYE shakeup’ since the scheme began during the second world war. The idea is:

Rather than leaving employers to process different tax codes and pay income tax for employees, the new system would automatically deduct income tax and national insurance contributions directly from an employee’s gross pay as it is paid into their bank account.

Apparently various technology providers are being approached.

This is just a bit of steamlining isn’t it ? cheaper and easier for employers ? completely innocent ?

Well no. Not when you consider how it would have to work.

If PAYE was deducted directly by ‘the new system’. The money would have to go through the ‘new system’ before it reached you.

So if the brewery pays a monthly salary to Tom, Dick, and Harriet. It will send all of that money to HMRC, HMRC will take what it believes is its due and pass the remainder on to Tom and the others. There are a number of ugly little implications.

First of all, the majority of money flowing into a standard bank account would now come from the government. Most people’s income comes from employment with lesser amounts from tax credits pensions etc. Effectively, most of us would be beholden to the government for our daily bread. The level of control this would allow them puts anything the old communist states ever managed into the shade. What’s this unexplained £30 payment from your auntie Lavinia ? Why didn’t you pay income tax on it ?

Secondly, even ignoring malice, the possibility of common or garden screw up looms large. In the same story the Telegraph reports some 4.5 million workers are paying too much PAYE – one flick of a switch at HMRC and that could be 20 million workers. Not that that would ever be done deliberately would it ?

This disastrous idea comes from a collective mindset that thinks the State Should Be In Charge. The truth of the matter is that both this notion is endemic throughout Labour (of course) but also the Tories and Lib Dems. I don’t believe that any of the big three parties are on our side – they are on their side.

Things will not get better under the next government whatever it’s hue. Things will get worse.