Carry On & Fakes...

What's Up? Not sure what happened, if someone changed the batteries, but what started off looking like a normal "on trend" week for us suddenly caught some momentum and went a bit nuts. With no wholesale going out at all, our second-best volume week of the year falling short of the best by a miniscule 8 casks... It has meant we have had to scramble a bit so if we've been caught slightly on the hop and have been a bit late delivering beer - a) sorry b) thank you for your patience and understanding, c) we did get everything done (or at least will do by end of day), d) any emergencies please let us know ASAP! And always feel free to call my mobile (below) and e) - most important - thank you for all the support. 

Otherwise, the COMFORTABLY NUMB is ready to roll and the PRESSED RAT & WARTHOG we fermented old skool in the square fermenter is coming on superfast and only days away from being ready.

Finally - our smaller 5BBL kit continues to allow Graham to return to our roots and produce more new and funky stuff. Ready to ship as of 30 mins ago is a beer that is Malt, not hop driven - brewed exclusively with Cara Gold malt. It has a fabulous dried mango flavour and loads of fruit going on in it. We believe that brewing with just Cara is very unusual [tell us otherwise!] - but absolutely love the flavours in this one. We're going to call it CARRY ON (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Carry On)  with a nod to the Cara Gold driven nature of the beer. A bit corny we know, but then you've read my jokes before... 

What's On? 

Struggling with the graphics today a bit... Will send a sort of contact sheet of them later of them if helpful? 

Anyway, we have:

MOONDANCE 4.2% Pale Ale

SUNDOWN 4.3% Golden IPA

ALTON'S PRIDE 3.8% Best Bitter

COMFORTABLY NUMB 5% Strong Ale

And also  but please be super quick of you want some of these: 

NOTHING ELSE MATTERS 4.7% Pale Ale (single hop-type)
CARRY ON 4.7% Cara Gold driven beer of deliciousness... 

And by end next week:

PRESSED RAT & RAT WARTHOG 3.8% Dark Mild

And in KEGS

JAGGED LITTLE PILSNER 5% Pilsner

BARBARIAN 4.7% Lager

What's About? A friend of Triple fff's - Geoff Dye - is a huge contributor to the Brewery History Society - he's a lovely fellow and takes the history seriously - Brewery history approached with the rigour of an academic... but well written and accessible. 

This week I got to read a piece about fake beer. The story is brilliant. He prefaces it with a look back to the late 1880s when Guinness started standardising bottles to avoid the amount of fake Guinness out there... Anyway, that was child's play... fast-forward to the 1990s and there is/was a gentleman called Mr. Titus who managed to run a massive operation producing fake Carling and fake Fosters. He got busted for doing something like 600-700 50L kegs per week, but when you read the story, it sounds like it could be a lot more! 

The bare bones of it go - Titus starts up a company and has Usher's brew a white label beer for him, down to very specific recipe instructions... Ushers for the record did nothing wrong and had no idea what was going on. 

Meanwhile, Titus's crew nab [steal/collect] as many empty 50L kegs as they can from North London and surrounds and begin filling them and then selling them direct to pubs at a small discount to what Bass & the big boys would have been selling direct. It takes ages for them to get busted - and amusingly when they are busted in part via a taste test the opinions were that the beer was not Carling Black Label because you couldn't taste the Dimethyl Sulphide (for me what makes Carling so gross but each to their own) - though the in house beer tasters (who made Carling) preferred the fake! 

Anyway - a great story that was massively covered up by the big breweries because they were so embarrassed, and one that I think he got away with... No prison sentence, a fine of £15k, some assets confiscated, 3 year ban on being a director. He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!  

Kind of a fascinating story that this level of fraud can exist outside of China in this day and age... My back of the envelope maths would reckon he cleared a million quid tax-free from it all... I guess a million quid blip for the big boys is a lot less than reputational damage of how this could all happen. Us small bods get hit by our audits on traceability and tracking super hard... Feels a bit like 2 sets of rules here, given these guys didn't even shout about what had happened to their customers! Then again, maybe the problem is actually 'elf n safe T because all things being equal, beer is a safe product.

On the subject of beer, hope we can bring you some fabulous stuff next week. 

Wish you a cracking weekend,

Xen

P.S.

Some stuff on fake stuff... 

Firstly a true story - I was lucky enough to be skiing in 2020, and got chatting to some folks in a bubble lift in Austria [poor folks - I love a captive audience or in this case an audience in captivity!). They worked for Dopplemayr the folks who make the best ski lifts in the world... [when you're a long way up in the air dangling from a cable I do feel reassured when it is one made by Austrian engineers!]. When they heard that I lived in Hong Kong and spent a lot of time in China they told me that one day they had received a call in their engineering department from a ski resort in China, asking for spare parts... Except at that time Dopplemayr had never installed a lift in China! It was a fake but one that had been done so well, they even copied the stickers with the numbers of HQ in Austria's correct maintenance... 

Some of these more appealing than others! 🧐