The Long Arctic Night

Barents set out on May 6, 1596, from Amsterdam, only for his ship to become trapped in the ice, forcing the crew to overwinter in a tiny wooden hut they built on Nova Zembla:

Meanwhile we had made good progress with the building of our hut, and the four walls were almost completed, so that everyone could see there were to be three doors, one facing east, one south, and one west. The north wall, however, was entirely solid, as the rawest and coldest winds generally blow from that direction; and Piet, well aware of that, had, with foresight, provided for it in his construction plan. … On the following day we added the slanting roof, which sloped at an oblique angle from north to south, and covered it thickly with mud paste, which froze as usual the instant it was applied.

The men encounter bears, live on seal meat and develop scurvy. When the ice finally melts the following Spring they find the ship has been crushed, forcing them to sail back to the mainland in two small boats.

Amazingly the hut itself was rediscovered almost 300 years later, in 1871; many artefacts were recovered and are kept at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The photograph shows how it looked in 1881, but the site is now marked by a memorial and is visited by arctic cruise ships. In recent years, as global warming melts the ice, the Northeast Passage has become passable to shipping, shaving around 3000 miles from the journey between the Netherlands and South Korea.

Chris Jordan’s web gallery is well worth a visit.

Spymonkey’s Moby Dick is at the Liverpool Playhouse until Saturday October 24th.

Today BrewDog issued shares in the company as part of a plan to build a new brewery north of Aberdeen. They need to raise upwards of £2 million to build an energy self-sufficient brewhouse with many times the capacity of the current facility. It’s an ambitious expansion plan and one that reflects the market for craft brewing, which is growing despite the recession. The share issue, cleverly named ‘Equity for Punks’ is indicative of the current banking market; the company is raising money from small investors rather than asking the banks (though it is doing that too).

I am not a financial adviser of course and I’ve only skimmed the issue document but in all the excitement I suspect some investors are missing a few things. For one thing, BrewDog is not about to become a plc in the usual sense. Its shares will not be traded publicly on the stock market, though a trading scheme on the Equity for Punks website is in the works. Investors will share in any dividends that are paid out and–best of all in my view–get a 20% discount on BrewDog ales bought at the online store. In many ways this is a very Victorian way of raising capital, except that where information on private share issues used to be limited to those ‘in the know’ BrewDog has publicised its share issue online: you can hardly miss it.

The share issue was billed as a moment that would ‘change the face of brewing’ and I think it has that potential, but not because of the actual share issue part. BrewDog’s founders are in their mid-twenties and they realise that part of the success of craft brewing recently has been in local markets. They also realise that ‘local’ doesn’t have to mean what it meant 20 years ago; now it means Facebook friends and Twitter followers and whatever new community-driven service appears in the years to come. BrewDog’s strategy seems to be to make itself the Internet’s local brewer and to use its online store and the supermarkets to spread its products around the country.

So what about the investment? Buying shares is a risky business so if you’re serious it’s best to take advice and read the issue document carefully, but I suspect most investors will be buying the minimum of one share. For that you get 20% off at the BrewDog online store and membership of an online community. I’d be inclined to forget about the investment part and look at the £230 share price as a membership fee for an online beer club.

When you visit a zoo or a wildlife park it is often difficult to take pictures of the animals. If you’re not careful all you get is a picture of the cage with the animal somewhere hidden in the background. But with a little planning it is possible to get rid of the fencing at least enough so you can see the animal and perhaps crop a decent picture from your shot. The picture above was taken through a fence at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust centre at Martin Mere in West Lancashire. The blurred green lines are the fence and are actually in front of the bird. Had the bird been further back from the fence it would have disappeared almost completely, as in the picture below where all you can see is a slight lack of definition in the lower quarter of the image–that’s the fence.

This works best if you use a DSLR camera, but many compact cameras give you some control over how the picture is taken and you can get good results. There are three key things you need to think about.

First, if your camera doesn’t have manual focus, make sure the autofocus is fixed on the animal itself and not the bars of the cage. You’ll have to keep trying to get a fix on your subject, especially if the holes in the wire are small. Get in as close to the fence as you can. Switch off the flash so it doesn’t reflect off the bars.

Second, make the depth of field as shallow as possible so that everything in front of the animal and everything behind is out of focus. You can do this by opening the aperture as wide as possible. If your camera gives you some manual control turn the dial to ‘A’ or ‘Av’ (Aperture Priority) and make the f-number as small as you can.

Third, use the longest zoom you can lay your hands on; these were taken with a 300mm equivalent zoom lens with the aperture at f5.6. As I said above, this will work best on a DSLR, but I’ve had success in the past even with a Canon compact camera.

]]> http://chrisroutledge.co.uk/2009/10/taking-pictures-through-a-fence/feed/ 2 http://chrisroutledge.co.uk/2009/10/this-is-ms-ale/ http://chrisroutledge.co.uk/2009/10/this-is-ms-ale/#comments Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:56:15 +0000 Chris http://chrisroutledge.co.uk/?p=1552 On his blog beer writer Pete Brown considers the way supermarkets sell beer and gives an interesting inside view of how M&S came to develop its range of own-label beers and ciders. Significantly M&S is being up front about where the beers and ciders have come from. Typically supermarkets keep the origins of their own-brand ranges well hidden and in some cases the breweries involved in producing own-brand beer are probably quite relieved about that. This time though it seems there is real quality. It would be nice to think that other supermarkets will follow suit in selling on quality and thoughtful selection rather than simply on price:

We recommended to M&S that if they wanted to be taken seriously there had to be a big enough range to allow people to browse and make an informed choice. We suggested a diversity of styles, with plenty of information for people on what the style was, what it tasted like, with a food matching recommendation on the back. M&S felt strongly that apart from beer style, the range should be organised according to provenance – each beer taking the lead on where it came from. They made a commitment to source each of the beers from the place it said it actually came from. [Link]

Thanks to The Ormskirk Baron for the tip.

The number of breweries in Britain declined steadily through most of the twentieth century as brewing businesses merged into ever more enormous corporations, most of which have chased profit and low costs at the expense of quality and distinctiveness. In fact the last time the number of breweries grew like this was in the mid-nineteenth century, when brewers like Robert Cain, Andrew Walker, Timothy Taylor and others began to be successful.

Nineteenth-century brewers benefited from a relaxation of licensing laws following the Beer Act of 1830, after which the number of small brewers–what we would now call ‘micro-breweries’–grew enormously. Over the next few decades the laws were gradually tightened up under pressure from the Temperance movement, but in the middle of the century many small brewers managed to get a toe-hold in the market and some of them did very well indeed.

It strikes me that there are quite a few similarities between our time and the mid-Victorian period; similarities that might explain this growth in brewing. These include improved (and cheaper) equipment, the growing supply of commercial property, and less quantifiable factors, such as the desire to start businesses and be your own boss. As in 1860, so in 2009, but the single most significant external influence on nineteenth-century brewing was Temperance and in 2009 an increasingly hostile attitude towards pubs and drinking has once again opened up the market in an interesting way.

The idea that Temperance campaigners could improve the beer and pub trade might seem counter-intuitive, but bear with me. In the decades after the 1830 Beer Act drunkenness became a major public worry, especially in cities like Liverpool and London. By the 1870s and 1880s, as the Temperance movement began to gain popular support, smart brewers began to develop more civilized atmospheres in their pubs. Then, as now, brewers tried to ‘move to quality’ and establish a ‘respectable’ image for themselves. This was the era of the brightly-painted dray and fine horses, but also of the luxurious city centre pub and what became known as the ‘improved public house’ movement. We no longer have a Temperance movement as such, but worries about street violence, alcoholism in the young, and other medical effects of alcohol have led to what many regard as a concerted attack on pubs and the drinks industry in general.

A lot of people are pessimistic about what is going to happen to pubs in the coming years, but I’m not. The ‘traditional’ English pub is already quite different from the way it was twenty-odd years ago when I was in my late teens. The best pubs are cleaner, more pleasant places to drink than they were back then. The beer is better too; and there is more choice, not only in terms of the beer available, but the range of places in which to drink it. This is not to say the last few years haven’t been difficult, or that it isn’t going to keep on being tough, or that there aren’t issues that need to be addressed, but I see the best pubs and brewers adapting to those difficulties and, importantly, moving towards quality.

I’m still worried about aggressive supermarket price campaigns and about what we might lose if pubs keep closing. And more pubs will close no doubt. But as CAMRA’s figures suggest, brewing itself is thriving; there is even evidence to suggest that the pubs are beginning to beat off the competition. We are in the middle of a dramatic change in the way our towns and cities work, and the way we live our lives. Politics, economics, and simple demographic change are all putting pressure on that indefinable place, the ‘traditional English pub,’ but change is not necessarily for the worse. On the subject of those 711 breweries, the only sensible question is: where to start?

Read the press release here.

It includes twelve new pieces of writing (critical and creative) and some fabulous images from artists who have been influenced and inspired by Lowry. You can buy it from the well known online bookshop whose name begins with an A, or indeed from Liverpool University Press’s own website (click here). Meanwhile, preparations are in full swing for the centenary exhibition Under the Volcano at the Bluecoat, which will include visual art, film, and fascinating archival material relating to Lowry – described by biographer Gordon Bowker in his essay for our book as ‘probably the most neglected genius of modern English literature’. [Read More]

Helen is also running a short five-week course on Lowry at Liverpool University, in the Continuing Education department entitled Voyaging Under the Volcano: An Introduction to Malcolm Lowry. For more information visit the Continuing Education English webpage or contact the Centre for Lifelong Learning t cll@liverpool.ac.uk Enrolment ends on Monday September 21st.

I speculated this afternoon that these supermarket deals may well be aimed at women. Cheap ales are often positioned at the end of the aisle and as every Mad Men aficionado knows, that’s where women find special treats for their families. In a time of recession cheap beer to drink at home makes a lot of sense, but there may be something deeper here. With pubs apparently unable to reduce their prices the supermarkets are making a play for another market they don’t yet own, damaging competition and once again changing our behaviour for their benefit. These extraordinary promotions are a lot of fun for beer drinkers, including me, but if they result in more pubs closing, or worse, becoming bland, price-driven outlets for cheap booze, then nobody benefits in the long run. If more people are forced to retreat to their living rooms for lack of a decent nearby pub, Britain will be a sadder, less interesting, and less healthy place.

The Ormskirk Baron blogs about beer here.