“Better creations are superior to more creations”.

In March last year, I posted a comment on Mark Ramsey’s blog. Mark has consistently said that radio listeners don’t want more choice, and used this to relentlessly bash HD Radio, the US’s kind-of-equivalent to DAB Digital Radio here in the UK. I’ve consistently said that choice was the thing that sold DAB Digital Radio over here, and thus there’s proof that radio listeners want additional choice. In short, I always thought Mark was wrong.

I’m beginning to think that Mark was right. In a way, at least.

I am, as regular readers of this blog know, quite a fan of beer. So it was that, a few weeks ago, while on holiday in the Benelux countries, I popped into Antwerp’s famous Kulminator, a beer mecca for Belgian beer afficionados.

Walking around any ordinary Belgian beer shop, I recognise almost every brand on the shelves. I regularly drive into Northern France to buy beer to take back home. I have an endearing irritating habit of photographing beer. A fully paid-up member of CAMRA, I go to beer festivals where I can, and always buy the guest beer in pubs where I can, assuming that they don’t sell my favourite beer on tap; only the Hat and Stick in London does, as far as I can tell.

So, I walked into the Kulminator with excitement, confidently picking up the beer menu.

I flicked through the beer menu.

And panicked.

You see, that’s a photograph of the beer menu above. It’s 38 pages long, of tightly-typed bottled beers. It proudly states that there are 918 different beers in stock. I knew some of them. I didn’t know others of them. I found this choice bewildering; scary, even.

I did what most people would have done in the situation. I went up to the bar. “Um, hello. I quite like darker beers. What would you recommend?” I enquired of the landlady. She recommended a Golden Carolous. I drank it.

In the television world, the amount of channels broadcast on Sky can be bewildering too. Just looking at that list fills you with dread of ever finding anything. Thankfully, Sky have made this easier, with an electronic programme guide which helpfully splits channels up by genre, then by programme.

In both cases, this is choice made much easier - not just one big list, but clearer navigation to something I want, either from a human (in the Kulminator) or from technology (on Sky).

But because screens aren’t the first thing you think of when it comes to a radio, radios are very poor when it comes to navigation. The 50-odd stations I can pick up on my DAB Digital Radio are sorted in nothing other than alphabetical order. The only thing I know about these stations is the name. Now, I know what most of these brands stand for - but I wonder how many people, unpacking their DAB Digital Radio, have the faintest idea what these stations play?

Life clearly gets worse if you’re skipping through XM Radio’s 170 channels - and don’t even get me started on the user interface of a typical internet radio, where a great demonstration is to try tuning into WBUR (which is helpfully near the top of the ‘W’s, after the bottom of the ‘K’s, and therefore if you’re tuning in alphabetically using one tuning knob it’ll take you a number of minutes to find); and what’s “WBUR” as a descriptor of what I could find there?

For radio listeners, there’s no doubt that choice is good, in my mind. But we need better ways of navigating through this choice: otherwise the choice turns into unmanageable bewilderment. Bewilderment only fixable with a stiff drink. Might I recommend a Golden Carolous?

Ye Olde Cross Keys, says the sign as you near the door. You might already get concerned about how good this pub is going to be if it calls itself something so twee.

But it can’t be all bad: this pub, in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, also has a log fire and is an Adnams pub. Adnams is the local brewery, from the Sole Bay Brewery just up the road in Southwold. (I say “just up the road” - it takes a considerably long time to drive there, as I discovered a few years ago).

Take a trip to Southwold, and you’ll also fall into what looks like the Adnams brewery shop. If you’ve been to any beer festival, or frankly, any pub recently, you may be aware of the oast-house-shape logo and beer clips that Adnams use, and the excellent cartoony images of East Anglia now used on everything from beer mats to mouse mats, posters and coffee cups. You can, of course, buy Adnams merchandise there, as well as Adnams beer (at more-expensive-than-supermarket prices). But the shop also sells wine. Yes wine, which is a bit… well… odd.

Until you see the clientele of the Cross Keys, that is.

I feel one of the oldest there. Looking around is what I can only surmise is a group of either university students or stockbrokers, arm-in-arm with doey-eyed blondes who probably all work in PR. They’re wearing totally new-looking clothes: the country-look, probably a mix of Timberland from Carnaby Street and Hackett, that shop on Regent Street that decked out the rugby team a few years ago, and continue to dress clueless chief executives with check shirted nastiness. Frankly, these people don’t look as if they’ve ever been in the country before; they’ve probably rolled-up in their Range Rovers and newly-bought chunky knitwear only hours before, and are most upset that there’s no edge coverage on their BlackBerry. They all look virtually identical - square-chinned closely-cropped brown-haired posh blokes in rugby shirts or checked lumberjack shirts, accompanied by blondes with slightly too much eye-shadow wearing very similar.

The clientele is frankly hateful. They’re crammed into this pub like some kind of unpleasant cloned disease, “Yah”ing to themselves. I try to ignore them.

On offer when I went to the Cross Keys were the full standard Adnams range of Explorer, The Bitter, and Broadside. All these Adnams beers are also available in supermarkets and pubs across the country. “The Bitter” is a silly name, quite frankly, for a beer. I think it earnt the “The” fairly recently from a man in marketing.

Explorer is a light beer, and the newest of the Adnams range. I try one; it’s surprisingly colourless, and concerningly watery, with little taste to it. It would quench a thirst. It wouldn’t worry someone who’s used to Carling or Fosters, either. I find it a bit of a waste of time. It actually tastes better bottled: it tastes rather dull here from draft.

I fight my way to the bar, where the stockbrokers are congregated, unaware that anyone else other than them might like more beer, this being a PUB AND EVERYTHING. The attractive and unaccountably-giggly girl behind the bar takes my glasses, giggles, asks me what I’d like to drink, giggles, pours, giggles, blushes, asks me for frankly enough money to pay for this in central London instead of a sleepy seaside town nearly 45 minutes’ drive from Ipswich, giggles, takes my money, giggles, gives me change, giggles, blushes, and passes me the beer I’ve just bought because I can’t get near the bar because the stockbrokers are there blocking every avenue to the bar for the polite and thirsty. She giggles again. I’ve a lot of time for attractive girls who giggle and blush, until I realise she’s blonde and wearing a rugby shirt, which sadly means she probably works in PR during the week.

Broadside, on the other hand: well now. This is a darker, stronger beer. I think, from memory, that the bottled version is stronger than the draft you get in pubs; but even in a pub, this isn’t a ’session beer’, one of those beers you can drink all evening. This is last-of-the-evening stuff; sweet and full-flavoured, with a toffee taste. It’s always been my favourite Adnams beer.

And it’s the favourite of the clientele, who are currently slapping each other on the back. One slightly older PR woman has just asked us for our spare seat - she’s wearing knitwear, an ever-so-posh scarfette, and a large chunky ornate silver bangle-necklace. She probably thinks we’re the locals.

In short, then: ignore the “Ye Olde” - the Cross Keys is a nice pub to go in, if a little twee and formulaic for a seaside pub. Adnams beers are probably quite a good choice - I’ve tasted considerably worse. All you have to do is ensure that it’s not the stockbrokers’ day out.

Photo: cyocum on Flickr. Used under licence.

Photo: Steve Rhodes, of Bank of America staff trying to stop him taking a photograph in a public place (the pavement). Take on March 19th. Used under licence.

PhotoShopped
Ack. Very splendid blog showing really quite awful photoshop work. Much amusement.

XMPP Pubsub Radio Playlist Bot
Interesting - an XMPP "now playing" bot for a radio station. Not quite convinced it works like this, but XMPP is certainly worth looking at for a distributed way of doing that type of information. Much better than regularly pinging a server. via kael

How to Look and Feel Like a Complete Idiot
Amusing comment from Curtis Poe (a BBC chap). Via Alan Connor.

A Copenhagen beer map
I personally recommend B and J in this map - both great places to eat and drink some unusual beer. And what a good idea.

How do you get your radio these days?
Word Magazine: "We're thinking of doing a piece in the magazine about the state of radio. How are you getting your radio? And what are you listening to?" - interesting comments!

Math links for fun and charity « Let?s play math!
Use of one of my photos: this time a recent one from the London Transport museum. Nice to see it used in a totally different situation.

TechCrunch UK » News Round
What a brilliant new service Mike's started. Excellent, I hope he continues.

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from February 29th to March 20th. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

At the London Drinker Beer Festival last night with some good friends. It’s on until Friday night.

I had (halves only)…

- Irving’s Frigate (”golden bitter with citrus hop flavour”). It was quite a nice start to the evening, but a little, well, dull.
- Dark Star’s American Pale Ale (”Chinook and Centennial hops provide dryness to balance the crisp taste”). Delicious - very similar to Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, which is my official favourite beer.
- Thornbridge’s Kipling (”intense fruit flavours and long, bitter aftertaste”). Good, and similar (if a little less bitter) than the American Pale Ale. Thank you Giacomo for your recommendation.
- Fox’s Cerberus Norfolk Stout (”creamy stout, with chocolate and raisin character”). Good, nice dark beer, though stouts like this need, to my taste, hand-pulling, and not just pouring from a barrel.
- Dark Star’s American Pale Ale. Again. Because it was delicious.

We then typed in “curry” into the iPhone’s Google Maps application, and two minutes later found us in a quite pleasant curry house, where I proceeded to demolish a chicken and spinach curry.

Photo: mine. OK, this was last year. I forgot my camera this year.

I do promise some small discussion of beer in this blog, and rarely deliver, what with all this talk of radio and occasional rants against Demon Internet, purveyors of my current 128k connection through no fault of my own, blah blah.

However. When I was in Australia recently, I was taken aback with the quality of the beer there. In my beer review posting, I describedCooper’s Vintage Ale as delicious - a bottle-conditioned, treacly, full-bodied, slow-drinking treat. Almost certainly worth hunting out again when I next visit.

With that in mind, I thought I’d let fellow lovers of the hop know that Cooper’s Vintage Ale is currently for sale in Tesco. Tesco have been steadily improving their beer selection, to the point where my local Tesco has three sets of shelves full of different types of ales and foreign beers, and that’s before insipid lager kicks in. It is now certainly one of the best supermarkets for choice and price.

Confusingly, Tesco sell Coopers Vintage with an additional sticker on them saying “Tesco Drinks Awards: Best Import”, and in a cardboard six-pack (much like you buy bottles of beer in American supermarkets). Given that I love this stuff, I simply picked up the six-pack without thinking.

At the self-service till, though, the machine failed to recognise the barcode on the bottom of the six-pack. A man came over. “Any idea how much these are, mate?” I’ve learnt to say “No” every time someone says that, so man tells woman to go and find out. Woman toddles off, gets the price-tag off the shelf, and comes back. Man scans it.

There you go, mate, £1.99 (AU$4.46).

Well, I wasn’t arguing. So I’ve actually managed to pick up six bottles for the bargain price of 33p (74 cents) each. Bargain…

I’ve spent the last few weeks in Australia, mainly for the Commercial Radio Australia conference, but also mainly on holiday. (I spoke at the CRA about making money from digital radio - my speaking notes are online if you wanted to take a look). But, since I’ve promised ‘beer’ in this blog for a while now, here’s my take on the beer.

Australia is a country with a resurgent craft beer industry. One thing I didn’t expect, when going into Melbourne’s tourist information centre, was a leaflet on craft beer makers; but that’s exactly what was on offer (complete with a foreward written by an Australian MP).

James Squire makes a ton of English-style beers, and are based in Sydney, Australia. This was a very creditable, and nicely hopped, amber ale, drunk in The Hero Of Waterloo, listening to a pub singer and enjoying the experience. Later in the trip, we visited a brew-pub run by the company (in central Melbourne); on offer was a great porter, a splendid IPA, and some not-normally-available brews. Most impressive; unusually-labelled bottles are available in many places, and it was decried by our tour guide one day as “a bloody good choice”. Which I thought too.

Proper brew-pubs did exist, not just those run by large breweries. As an example, we tried the Lord Nelson Brewery in Sydney, which is also a hotel and a pub. I tried their pale ale: served in typical Australian “too bloody cold” fashion. It was pretty good, if not outstanding, and the ambience in the pub was a little loud (a gaggle of girls next to us being chatted up by a set of blokes fresh-from-the-office on the table text to us) so we didn’t stay too long. The “Three Sheets”, advertised on the beer mats, was over 7%.

Of course, you can’t always get it right, even in Australia. Cascade Premium is from Tasmania, and is apparently from Australia’s oldest continually-operating brewery. It’s made by the same people who bring you Fosters (a beer, incidentally, which I didn’t see once in my trip - whether I was just blind to it or not I don’t know). A pretty standard-tasting lager. I don’t like lager much, but for the middle of the day, it was rather enjoyable, I guess.

Available here in the UK in many supermarkets, is Coopers - available here (in the UK) and in Australia as “Coopers Green” and “Coopers Red”. Green, seen here (and above) is a creditable pale ale, bottle-conditioned and tasty. Coopers also sell home-brew kits, interestingly; possibly the first major brewer I’ve ever seen doing this; indeed, their website almost promotes it as a way to enjoy the great taste of Coopers without going out to the supermarket and buying some. Bizarre.

Also part of the Fosters empire is this, Carlton Draught. I ordered this principally because I reckoned that if it was “on draught” it must be good - but clearly it wasn’t on tap at all! Possibly the most boring beer I’d had all trip; the uninspiring cafe that we were in didn’t sell anything other than cheap lagers.

One of our better finds was a bar and restaurant called Cookie, hiding upstairs from some rather dowdy looking doors on Swanston Street in Melbourne. Not just was the food delicious, but their beer menu was around thirty pages long, including many excellent local brews. Mountain Goat, a small brewery in the Richmond part of the city, produce a lot of seemingly excellent beers; I tried (once more!) the IPA, which was gloriously hoppy and excellently delicious. This was for sale in the odd shop we passed, and I really ought to have brought some home. The bottle is quite fun: “bottled but not tamed” is a nice phrase. Bottle-conditioned, naturally.

Also on sale at Cookie was this - Australia’s answer to Belgian beer. This is Cooper’s Vintage - around 7%, and absolutely delicious - a bottle-conditioned, treacly, full-bodied, slow-drinking treat. Almost certainly worth hunting out again when I next visit; and this was the recommendation of the waiter, who was delighted that someone was taking a good interest in beer. He brought me no less than seven bottles to look at!

We enjoyed that building so much that we decided to visit the rooftop bar the day after. While hardly a huge selection, you could still choose from a number of bottled beers, as well as, on tap, Little Creatures Pale Ale and this, which is Little Creatures Bright Ale. Bright is sweeter than the Pale, and tastes nicely fruity. A perfect beer for a lazy afternoon, particularly on the seventh floor of this rather unusual building. (Little Creatures also sell cider, which the bar stocked.)

I also tried Victoria Bitter (so you don’t have to), Coopers Red, which was a little disappointing, and Tooheys New, a lager, which was equally, um, lagery. James Squire’s porter was nicely authentic, too. And the Lowenbrau dunkel I had in a Bavarian theme pub was excellent.

Beer appears to be measured in different sizes depending which pub you went into. A “pot” is different to a “schooner” (except when it isn’t) and a “pint” is the standard (curiously, a pint glass in Australia is 570ml instead of the UK’s 568ml).

What surprised me is how much ‘proper’ beer is available in Australia. True, the Cascade, VB and Carlton is everywhere; but in virtually every place we went to, we could find some bottle-conditioned, local, beer; and normally some proper beer on tap. The craft beer breweries in Australia are, by and large, pretty new; so it’s clear that there’s a real thirst for a different taste of beer in Australia other than the standard lagers. Indeed, there is probably more choice in Australia for the more discerning beer drinker than there is in the UK, rather embarrassingly.

One of my Australian friends sent me an email apologising for their beer after my visit. Not at all. You should be proud of it.

I’ve promised “beer” in this blog’s description, but blog very little about it.

Yesterday, we went to France to buy some more beer. (If you’re reading outside Europe, you might not appreciate the wild difference in tax on beer between EU member states).

So - here’s a nice photo of some Kronenbourg. If you get told your train home is 4 hours delayed, what else is there to do than to drink? We enjoyed three cans of Kronenbourg Pur Malt before driving onto the train.

(If you’ve not yet guessed, it’s a zero-alcohol beer. It has over 70% of the French market. Costs the same as a coke. And it almost tastes like a proper beer, if not quite the same clean taste. Quite pleasant.)

I liked this photo, if only because it captures our slight unease at sitting in a car, drinking what looked like proper beer!