Ghosts of Christmasses Pasts

Were the ghost of Marley to visit me in the night to deliver one of his pre-Christmas 'change your ways' diatribes, I think I have a fair idea of what he'd be banging on about.

'Ben, you've given up on life', he'd say. 'You used to be so productive and creative. You'd come up with delicious recipes and share them with the world. You expressed opinions on food and drink in a pithy and engaging fashion with a uniquely quirky turn of phrase, bringing mild amusement to literally tens of people. Why did you stop, Ben? Why?'

And he'd probably have a point. 

Chucking my two cents on the 'cask in crisis' bandwagon

For a relatively small and not long established brewer, Cloudwater have certainly got peoples attention. Since announcing at the start of the year that they are to cease all cask ale production, everyone and their maiden aunt has had something to say on the matter.

Cloudwater are somewhat highly regarded, particularly around their Manchester base and among 'craftier' drinkers and while I haven't had the opportunity to try all that many of their offerings, those that I have tried have always been consistently drinkable - one of them sneaked into my top five beers of 2016.

Rightly or wrongly, the debate has expanded to encompass the broader questions around the future of cask beer:

Very Mean Numbers

I have a theory that if you make a statement and attach a number to it, some people will be impressed, , even if the numbers really aren't impressive, simply because you've taken the time to make the statement.

Or, to put it another way, people think that if it's worth mentioning, it must be worth mentioning, even when it isn't. If that makes sense?

This blog gets over *100* visitors EVERY SINGLE DAY!

See what I did there? It's true, it has a number in it, and it's made to sound impressive even though it really isn't.

But I guarantee there'll be someone somewhere not even reading this sentence properly because a part of their brain is still going 'ooh, hundred visitors, eh, that's not bad, is it? Bully for him'

Let's try and send a few more of you off into the realms of bemused agreement, shall we...


"Houses in this street go for upwards of £100,000!"

"Look at that bloke over there - he must be well over 5 foot tall!"

"You'll be generously remunerated with a five-figure salary package!"

All technically correct, yet all absolute wanky, misleading nonsense. Most of the time, you won't hear people extolling such modest virtues, because, well, it sounds ridiculous, but it happens a lot in the food and drink industry. Probably more than I'm comfortable with.

Look at all the cheap whiskies on an off-license shelf. 'Aged 8 years' they proudly proclaim, as though it's a mature old gentleman, in comparison to all those two and three year old whiskies out there.

'Seven whole days' (not one in seven, apparently...)

The truth is that - outside of the specialist market for young whisky, which isn't particularly cheap - you'd be hard-pressed to find a malt aged for fewer than eight years, and most Scotch will be blended from similar stuff. It's pretty much the lowest of low end. The youngest of the young.

You can see why an 18- or 25-year-old malt would want to proclaim its age, in order to distinguish it from the 8s, but the selling point of whisky is almost always age, not youth, so why do they do it with the youngest ones?

Greene King's ad campaign for Abbot Ale used to boast of how the beer was matured for 'seven whole days' and I have no doubt that there were some Abbot drinkers who considered this a very long time simply because they'd been told about it. To put it into a more realistic perspective, Cantillon in Brussels typically mature their beer for a year to 18 months and often quite a lot longer than this. A week is fuck-all.

Damning with faint hyperbole. Shouting about modest numbers. Unshrinking Violet Theory. This thing really should have an official name.

I have a beef

It's the same deal with 14-day aged steak, a familiar sight on pub menus. Imagine that! A whole fortnight! How impressed we all are...

Except that 14 days is pretty much the minimum maturation period for any cut of beef marketed as 'steak'. 35- and 50- day aged steak is not hard to find, and you can get stupid beef that's been hung for three months or so, though experiments show that peak taste is achieved at around 45.


Back to the supermarket, let's have a look at the packaging for ready meals:

'Be good to yourself' Lasagne - only 397 calories!!! 

 Buyers will think that's a low calorie count because the packaging proclaims it. Yet, a couple of items downstream towards the frozen aisle, there's a different lasagne ready meal, rather understated and not branded as lo-calorie that has a calorie count of 394. Fractionally lower than the diet version.

I don't know what we can do to stop this phenomenon, after all, they're essentially telling the truth, which, in advertising, is a feat in itself.

I just wish people would be less gullible and look at the numbers in context rather than isolation.

After all, we're always told that just because someone says something, it doesn't make it true. How about 'just because someone says something that is true, it doesn't make it impressive'?

50% off all naked goose-fat massages - today only

So, it's nearly Christmas then, and I've been feeling like I ought to write some sort of a seasonal bloggette.

You know, festive spirit and snowflakes and goodwill beaming down upon the glans of humankind. That sort of thing.

But the sorry truth is that I haven't really come up with any new Christmassy recipes yet, and I already used the puntastic title 'Yule Blog' a few years back, and can't think of anything anywhere near as clever.

So you'll have to amuse yourselves and just pretend that I said something hilarious about cloves.

Ten food trends I suppose I ought to have an opinion on

People occasionally come up to me and ask my opinion on various things.

Usually it's something along the lines of  'where's the best vegan restaurant in North Dakota that's open after midnight on Sundays?' or 'which pubs in London serve a hemp and raspberry stout and do a full breakfast -  as a child's portion?'

I give them the best answers I can, and then try to veer the conversation towards a topic where I have strongly held, staunchly right-wing opinions, in the hope that they'll run away like a simpering jackal.

You already know what I think about some of the big issues. Like tank beer, the horsemeat 'scandal', and why it's a fucking Marathon bar, not a S**ckers.

So, for a change, here's my take on some less important stuff. The trivialities that don't keep me awake at night.

It'll save you having to come up and ask me!

Feeding Tube

Maybe one of the reasons I've been so slack at this blogposting lark lately is that I have an imperial tonne of interests besides food and drink.

Folk music, for example. And philosophy. And cartography and comedy and travel and psephology and poker and football and building my own computers.

Oh, and railway systems. Particularly the London Underground. When I was 13 I visited every station in one day in an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of Records, don't you know.

Planning my route took a fair bit of poring over the iconic diagrammatic map, and since my childhood it's been one of my single favourite visual things.

As colleagues of mine well know, sometimes in meetings I doodle incessantly. And quite often I'm doodling railway maps, with ticks for stations and circles for interchanges. I don't even know I'm doing it half the time!

There have been a raft of 'alternative' tube maps over the last few years, some interesting, some stupid, and some that would make Harry Beck turn in his grave. At a perfect 45 degree angle.

But back on the subject of food, I'm rather tickled by this recent effort from the Cheese and Biscuits blog - a tube map that purportedly shows the best places to eat in London. Well, in Zones 1 and 2 anyway.

Restaurant staff to be given their cards

We've been upping the proverbial ante here at B-V HQ lately.

Not content with being my little Sous-Chef, Mrs B-V has added online marketing to her role profile and has been actively promoting my little blogette on Facebook and Twitter.

Consequently, recognition has been increasing: I took my father to Troy Barbecue for his birthday at the weekend, and was greeted with something vaguely approaching VIP treatment. Well - the waiters  knew who I was, and commented that they'd read my recent glowing review and were big fans of the blog.