French oyster deception, the precipice of the global food economy, and will Britain’s biggest craft brewer be missed?
The latest WFJ intel on food, farming & food culture
Hello and welcome back to your monthly updater on food, farming, and – a theme for this iteration especially – how localism could be a life-changing antidote to corporate food domination.
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On with it, then:
BrewDog has closed six of its bars in the South West – including those in Bristol and Bath. This being among dozens of others across the country, as the brand sinks deeper and deeper down the pan, with some saying Britain’s largest craft brewery (depending on your personal definition of ‘craft’) is all but dead. So, who killed it? And, should you care? The founders – Martin Dickie and James Watt, whose reputation had deteriorated and only have themselves to blame for it – have sold off the brand as it enters administration and after a catalogue of poorly-handled events and business decisions. That’s the short story, anyway. There are many – including former employees at the sharp end of its ‘toxic’ work culture, and those like myself who watched its corruption from irreverent boundary-pushing brewery circa 2014 to corporate misanthropic punk pretenders – who won’t miss it. Pour one out for the BrewDog fans who invested in their ‘Equity for Punks’ scheme, as their money has, apparently, been lost to the void.
What do you eat for Easter? If lamb, then it’s either been imported from the other side of the world, or derived from an animal kept on very little pasture (it’s easy to forget, but meat can be seasonal). Hogget or mutton, I suggest to you, is where it’s at: meat from a more mature animal tends to hold more flavour. Trouble is, it isn’t as marketed, therefore doesn’t sell as well, as lamb. So, ask your local butcher if the ‘lamb’ they’re selling is in fact hogget or mutton. Because to ask your butcher for ‘spring lamb’ is to ask your butcher for the insipid.
Below the paywall: A critic pans a Somerset restaurant; What happened to Frome’s Coop Kitchen?; Possibly the end of cheap food (and the world) as we know it; King Charles III eats an English oyster that’s actually French; and more besides.